• DOI:10.1089/ELJ.2012.0174
• Corpus ID: 14197781

Are All Jurisdictions Equal? Size Disparity in Election Administration

@inproceedings{Kimball2013AreAJ,
  title={Are All Jurisdictions Equal? Size Disparity in Election Administration},
  author={David Kimball and Brady Baybeck},
  year={2013}
}

• D. Kimball, Brady Baybeck
• Published 19 June 2013
• Political Science

Abstract The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was intended to create more consistency in election administration, but the United States still has a highly decentralized system. Almost 8,000 local jurisdictions have primary responsibility for administering elections, with significant discretion in how they conduct them, and there is a dramatic skew in the size of these jurisdictions. A very small number of heavily populated local jurisdictions serve the vast majority of voters while a large number of lightly populated jurisdictions serve the rest of the electorate. The interaction of local discretion and size disparities leads to very different experiences for election officials and voters in large versus small jurisdictions. Election administrators in large jurisdictions encounter the most difficult problems in conducting elections and in large jurisdictions the need for innovation is acute. At the same time, there is little push for election modernization due to the size disparity, which we discuss i...