2008 Presidential Election

My expertise is in trying to use data to identify where election problems lie in America, especially at a broad level --- such as comparing states with each other or comparing counties with each other. I know that the purpose of today’s conference is to think about LA County, but there are lessons to be learned from looking across the country. So, what I thought I would do today is look at the election of 2008 to ask what do the data tell us about the experience of voters nationwide on Election Day?

Survey Background
• Gauging the quality of the voting experience
• Research design
– 200 respondents contacted in every state, or 10,000
total
– Survey in the field the week following Nov. 4
– Pilot surveys conducted on in Nov. ’07 and Super
Tuesday ’08
– Parallel nationwide survey
• Limited set of questions
• 32,800 total respondents

The 2008 election was different from the last two presidential elections in that there was a clear winner on Election Day and the winner was a Democrat, Barack Obama. Controversies over voting technology that raged in 2000 and 2004 were relatively dormant. Instead, the election controversies that did come up were mostly discussions of lines to vote.1 This lack of discussion does not mean that there were not important issues related to voting technology that took place in 2008, just that they were not things deemed important by the media.

At a conference on election reform held by the National Academies of Science in 2004, Indiana’s Secretary of State, Todd Rokita, referred to poll workers as “the street level lawyers” of elections. The reason for his statement was obvious: poll workers, in polling places, are the people who determine how well an election is run and have the power over its implementation (Alvarez and Hall 2006; Claassen, Magleby, Monson, and Patterson 2008; Hall, Monson, and Patterson, forthcoming).

In 1965, the United States Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act to end discrimination against black voters at the polls in Southern states and throughout the nation. The Act prohibited the use of “tests” and other devices used to prevent people from voting. At issue was not the content of tests themselves but the wide latitude available to those charged with registering and authenticating voters.