EAC Advisory and Standards Board Meetings
I'm in Washington, D.C., for meetings of the Election Assistance Commission's Standards and Advisory Boards. Both bodies were created pursuant to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to provide guidance with respect to the EAC's research and policymaking functions. The Standards Board consists of 110 state and local election officials, while the Board of Advisors consists of 37 members, many of them from state and local government. The agendas for the meetings today and tomorrow may be found here, and Mike Alvarez discusses the agenda items here on the Election Updates blog.

The meetings today and tomorrow focus on various research projects being funded by the EAC. Among the areas being studied are poll worker training, vote counting and recounting, voter fraud/voter intimidation, and provisional voting. (The provisional voting research is being done by the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers and the Moritz College of Law, and I'm part of the research team.) Draft and status reports on these projects were made available to advisory and standards board members and discussed at today's public meetings, so they should now be matters of public record.

The EAC is also working on some in-house projects that were discussed today, including the construction of a web-based legal clearinghouse, which will include both state and federal laws regarding election administration. Another project looks at the web portals operated by state and local election authorities that provide information to voters. One of the interesting findings reported today is that official websites containing sample ballots or candidate information tend to get a lot more traffic from voters.

For election administration aficianados -- or to use Doug Chapin's affectionate term, "election geeks" (a group I'm proud to be part of) -- these are exciting times. That's partly because we're now seeing some serious research being done on important topics that have up until now received relatively scant attention. It's also because the advisory and standards board meetings provide an opportunity for exchanges between the people who actually run elections and people who study them. During the course of today's meetings, there were several points at which local election officials offered astute observations on the research being conducted by political scientists and election law scholars. For all of the criticism of HAVA, this is one product that shows great promise.

I take this to be a sign that election administration is developing into its own distinct field of study. It is, to be sure, an interdisciplinary field, relying on the collective knowledge of election lawyers, social scientists, computer scientists, and election officials, among others. Exchanges like the ones today add to the knowledge of each of these groups and, I hope, will ultimately lead to better run elections. - posted by Dan Tokaji @ 11:35 PM