There are many sources we (and others) use to obtain data about election administration. By discussing these sources, we hope to give you a “look under the hood” at where the information about elections comes from and how it gets used — as well as why it matters.
One of the most important data sources for anyone studying election management is the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which was established in 2002 when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). This piece will dig into why the EAC’s data collection efforts matter, and why we think election data is so important, anyway.
What is the Election Assistance Commission?
In 2004, based on the requirements that HAVA set out for it, the EAC released its first survey to gather information on election administration around the United States. Before we discuss the survey itself, though, let’s start with some background on those requirements.
Before HAVA came into effect, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 required the Federal Election Commission (and subsequently, the Election Assistance Commission) to report to Congress after each federal election on the NVRA’s impact on election administration, and to provide recommendations for improving procedures and other matters that were affected by the Act.
HAVA built on that and pushed things a little further: it directed that the EAC was to “serve as a national clearing house and resource for the compilation of information and review of procedures with respect to the administration of Federal elections.” Rather than being limited to collecting information on a single law, the EAC was directed to conduct studies and other activities to promote effective election administration overall. For example, HAVA mandated that the EAC collect information about the processes and procedures used to register voters. With those data in hand, the EAC can make informed recommendations for states to improve their policies and practices.
To gather this kind of critical election data, the EAC uses the Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS), which is run following every federal election. The survey — first administered following the 2004 election, as mentioned above — “has become the only census of basic data concerning election administration and policy in America” (Pew).
The survey can also help gather data to inform the conversation about timely election administration issues. For example, the EAVS gathers data about the use of electronic poll books, and looks at the prevalence of online voter registration processes.
Ensuring Compliance with Federal Voting Laws
The mandates on data collection that the EAC was given were not randomly developed; they help us collectively evaluate how well things are going for specific aspects of election management.
The EAC, for example, was tasked with collecting comprehensive data from states on all of the ballots sent to military and overseas voters, and all of the ballots received back by election administrators. Overseas citizens make up a relatively small percentage of the total voting population, and could be easily, accidentally overlooked — but the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986 protects the voting rights of members of the uniformed services and U.S. citizens residing outside of the country. The data collected by the EAC on this issue give us concrete information on the improvements and challenges states face under that law.
Far from being a busywork task, the results of which are filed away in a dusty cabinet and forgotten about, the EAVS provides critical information to the EAC — and from there, Congress and other branches of the U.S. government — as well as to researchers studying the impact of policies and election administration overall. The EAVS data allow us, as academics and practitioners, to place an emphasis on facts and data-based projects, and draw the curtain back on what is actually going on in U.S. election administration.
At the MIT Election Lab, for example, we depend on the EAVS for much of the data that informs the Elections Performance Index, which provides a way to compare election administration policy and performance across the states and from one election cycle to the next. The Index now offers a decade’s worth of data, and has become a valuable resource for election officials, policy makers, and voters.
While the EAVS provides much-needed data, it is not a panacea. There are a number of ways that the data it collects on election administration can be improved, and insights it can offer to other data collection instruments.
First, and an oft-discussed topic among the folks involved in running and studying elections, is the necessity of creating a common vocabulary in order to glean and understand insights across data sets and sources. Data collection practices vary from state to state, and it can be a struggle to find ways to compare what sometimes seems like apples and oranges. If surveys like the EAVS were administered using the same process and design, the resulting datasets could be compared or combined in useful ways to provide additional insights for election administration improvements across the United States.
A more critical gap in data collection is the fact that because the collection is not mandated at the state level, data are often not available for all states. This leads to gaps in our knowledge about voting administration; for example, there is a scarcity of data regarding voting machine performance. This lack of data is emblematic of a data vacuum in election administration in general. Without the data, we cannot accurately judge how well elections are managed, where there are challenges, and how exactly things have improved.
But wait, you might say. Jurisdictions must generate mountains of data concerning elections — what about candidates, vote totals, that sort of thing? It’s true that during (and after) each election, we are inundated with numbers. But candidate vote totals are rarely relevant data for assessing how well an election was managed, and tracking performance improvement. What we need, instead, are data about how (and when) voters encounter points of service.
When we don’t have the data, or we have data that doesn’t match a desired standard, we struggle to identify the areas of election administration that demand priority attention. And so, while we’re certainly paying close attention to the run-up to Election Day, and the day itself, we’ll also be looking with perhaps equal excitement to what will come along afterward: brand new, shiny data.
