Toward digital democracy

The United States has 12 months to create a voting system that works the way most people thought it was working.

A year ago, the general public learned what election officials in the United States have long known: The current setup is a mess. Old machinery, inaccurate registration rolls, ill-prepared poll workers and convoluted procedures make it impossible for us to conduct an election with a completely accurate count. Moreover, the authority over the election system in the United States is so decentralized and disparate that no single solution can bring elections closer to what the voting public now demands.

But, vote we will--to elect 435 representatives and 33 senators this November and a president in 2004.

Debate over the subject of electoral reform has been vigorous but has resulted in little change. Although all the discussions broadly address the issue of high- and low-level reform, most do not address the need for continuous improvement of the U.S. election system. And not one has looked for lessons from the one sector that has had plenty of experience not just in theorizing about change, but in executing it: the business community.

If election managers sit down to talk shop with their corporate counterparts, they will see that they face similar challenges--quality control, staff development, strategic planning and budgeting, customer service, and, yes, politics.

Although registration and voting must remain a core public function (like justice and defense), election administration can benefit by adopting basic corporate practices for strategy, organization and technology.

The problems of the last national election involved more than technology. And future elections will have comparable difficulties if change is not initiated across all the key dimensions. We need solutions that can lead to the construction of an electoral system that can uphold and sustain reform. Although there is no way to completely guard against error, sound business approaches that address three key elements--people, process and technology--will greatly enhance the planning and execution of reform.

To avoid the problems of the last election, we need to understand and implement strategic planning and technology. To manage this change process, we must:

• Apply best business practices to the electoral process

• Introduce performance-management standards

• Reform the voter registration process

• Move toward a digital democracy...carefully

Best practices for elections
In politics, as in business, the concepts for reform cannot be separated from the mechanisms that deliver reform. When the problem of electoral reform is viewed through the lens of best business practices, four basic reform opportunities emerge:

• Treat voters like customers. While maintaining election integrity, we must remove obstacles that deter eligible citizens who do want to vote. This stage of reform--involving straightforward, low-risk opportunities--includes such customer-centric questions as, What factors hinder citizens who want to register and vote? How can those factors be reengineered to encourage participation? Functions ripe for immediate action include voter education, registration-form and ballot design, absentee voting procedures, and poll-worker training.

• View electoral reform as a series of sequential challenges, not just as one project. We recommend that election officials look at the electoral process just as a manager would regard a company's supply chain, element by element. Such an analysis allows the separation of critical functions (registration, voter education, in-person voting, absentee voting) and players (citizens, government officials, political parties, technology vendors) for analysis and improvement. A step-by-step breakdown of the voting system could take advantage of comparative statistical analysis and benchmarks to identify the specific issues in specific jurisdictions that need immediate attention and encourage key stakeholders to agree on the priorities for change.

• Build organizations that can uphold reforms. Election agencies at all levels should be molded into professional institutions that initiate and sustain better approaches to election management. Fresh perspectives and new technologies will have little impact if election agencies remain ad hoc and seasonal.

• Develop a technology road map. Today, improvement in election technology is largely vendor driven. Future election infrastructure should allow the infusion of extant and emerging technologies into the electoral supply chain. If we do not use a road map, procurement decisions will be ill-informed and have unintended consequences that do not serve the voting customer. Will such offerings as direct-record electronic (touch-screen) machines actually reduce voter error and endure over time? Without a road map, it's difficult to ascertain.

Performance management
Voting reform must begin with a coldly analytical examination of what's right and what's wrong. We use metrics every day in business. There's no reason we can't use them in evaluating electoral change, though the process promises to be daunting. Despite some recent calls to institute national voting standards and processes, the U.S. Constitution mandates that individual states oversee the rules that govern voting procedures for federal elections. Most states, in turn, have left counties and local governments in charge of voter registration and other aspects of election administration.

Some states are already acting on reform ideas. Florida legislators, anxious to repair the state's image and electoral system, passed the Florida Election Reform Act of 2001 in May. By mandating statewide standards for ballot design, recount procedures and absentee voting, it shifted authority from the counties to the state, centralizing election reform among state leaders and leaving counties to carry out the state mandates. The act also put real money behind specific reforms: $24 million for machine upgrades, $6 million for voter education, and $2 million for a central voter registration database.

Other jurisdictions, however, lack the resources or motivation for an across-the-board effort.

We recommend the use of metrics to gauge the effectiveness of the system's performance at different stages (pre-election, Election Day and post-election) and during different election scenarios (e.g., high turnouts and low turnouts during general and special elections, runoffs and referendums). Results could be compiled into an election-management scorecard similar to the Balanced Scorecard used by many corporations to track performance in the most critical parts of their operations. An election-management scorecard could measure improvements (or slippage) in the management of internal processes, customer and employee satisfaction, and other areas of election management.

For ballot casting itself, the rate of residual votes (ballots that are uncounted, unmarked or marked incorrectly) is a valid metric. For absentee voting, metrics include the percentage of ballots returned with wrong information or after the deadline. Viewed across jurisdictions, metrics show where the most serious problems exist.