About a year and a half ago, during my last guest stint on Prawfs, I blogged about Atul Gawande’s book “A Checklist Manifesto,” which I had just finished. During those 18 months, in addition to my two other projects, I’ve drafted a new article, titled A Checklist Manifesto for Election Day: How to Prevent Mistakes at the Polls. It’s not quite ready for the primetime of SSRN, but it will be soon, and I am targeting it for law review submission this February. If you’d like to take a look before I post it (especially if you’re an Articles Editor at a highly-ranked journal!) just send me an email (joshuadouglas [at] uky [dot] edu) and I’ll be happy to pass it along.
Here is the abstract:
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best, even for complex problems. This certainly rings true for Election Day. The voting process involves a complicated web of rules and regulations, run largely by poll workers who are not professional election administrators. Poll workers are faced with myriad situations in which voting can go awry, and voters must comply with various requirements to ensure their votes count. But poll workers and voters generally are not given simple tools to help them through the process. Instead, the training guides poll workers receive from states and localities are lengthy, wordy, overly comprehensive, and difficult to use. They include anything and everything that might happen on Election Day, thereby making them essentially unusable as a reference in the heat of the moment when an issue actually arises. Instructions for voters are also often too complex. It is no wonder that poll workers and voters make mistakes in every election, which results in long lines, lost votes, and even post-election litigation. A simple and well-designed checklist can supplement these materials and help to avoid the humor errors that occur in many elections. This article shows how — in a time in which policymakers are searching for how to remedy the voting woes in our country — checklists provide a simple, non-partisan, and low-cost idea to improve election administration.
As always, comments are welcome!
Posted by Josh Douglas on December 31, 2014 at 12:53 AM