EVIC TEAM
- Founder & Director: Paul Gronke
- Research Director: Paul Manson
- Senior Program Advisor: Michelle M. Shafer
EVIC SOCIAL
Recent Updates
- Merry-go-Round: Tracking Ranked Choice Voting Results
- Explainer & Lessons Learned From the Ballot Drop Box Fires in Multnomah County, Oregon and Clark County, Washington
- Watch the Oct 8, 2024 “Fireside Chat” at Reed College about the Impact of EVIC’s Local Election Official Survey Program on Election Science Research and Election Administration
With apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
A great new initiative was just announced by ProPublica (hat tip to Rick Hasen). ElectionLand is described as a national reporting initiative that will cover voting problems during the 2016 election.
Participants include Google News Lab, WNYC, UniVision, and a number of other national and regional news networks. Reporters and organizations that sign up will receive:
This all sounds great but… the focus here is all on voting problems. Voting problems make for good copy. But do voting problems in some areas reflect on the typical voting experience? Does the existence of problems in some areas mean that the system as a whole is functioning poorly?
The answer generally is “no.” Lorraine Minnite demonstrated this six years ago in a book that should be required reading for any journalist who participates in ElectionLand. Charles Stewart, Michael Sances, and I recently showed that charges of a “rigged” election erode American confidence in our election system even though the charges bear little resemblance to the realities of American election administration.
I hope that ElectionLand participants don’t take the easy route, focusing on stories about election breakdowns, snafus, and possibly even outright fraud–with over 10,000 jurisdictions and 150 million voters, there are surely going to be some problems–while ignoring an elections system that generally functions well.
The problems are problems, and they need to be fixed. But let’s not reinforce the all too common belief that our system is permeated with fraud, beset by problems, and easily manipulated. Unfortunately, that kind of story is seldom clickbait.