New Book Describes How U.S. Elections Work
How do elections work in the United States?
Until recently, the answer was mostly, “according to state law—and state laws vary.”
While true, that wasn’t much help to journalists, policymakers or the voting public—and that answer focused on differences, not commonalities. Now, Helping America Vote: Election Administration in the U.S., a new publication from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), gives a more complete answer, acknowledging differences while following the through-line all states follow.
The title plays off the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the most recent major federal legislation to address elections.
Even though federal laws matter, “elections are a state responsibility; the constitution is clear on that,” says Tim Storey, NCSL’s chief executive officer. “No wonder then that procedures vary across the states and territories. It is impossible to give a single answer to how elections work without diving deep into details.”
The 190-page Helping America Vote is a primer, offering a general overview of what election administrators do from start to finish.
- The start: How electoral districts and precincts are created.
- The middle: candidate filing, ballot design, voter registration and voting itself.
- The finish: election results reporting and auditing.
Other topics covered include the complex governance structure for elections, plus voting technology, specific needs of military and overseas voters, how presidential elections compare to all other elections, and alternative voting methods.
“It’s a great resource for the most fundamental and best practices across the country,” said Commissioner Don Palmer, one of the four EAC commissioners. “If you are interested in audits, go to the audit chapter. You’ll find plenty of ideas. The same with any other question. There’s a chapter on it.”
To balance the reference book style, each of the 19 chapters has an interview with an election official who brings that topic to life. Common threads from these interviews? Election officials will make just about anything lawmakers want to have happen, happen—they just need time and resources. And they will do their work outside the reach of politics. They focus on “what can work not for your party, and not for my party, but for the American people,” EAC Commissioner Tom Hicks reports.
“Helping America Vote, we hope and expect, will be a reference that election officials and others can dip into to get what they want, when they want it,” Storey said. “And, because it does not include state-by-state data, this book will be evergreen, with a years-long shelf life.”
The audience? NCSL and the EAC those who are new to election administration at the local or state levels will benefit from the broad overview. The same for state lawmakers and even members of Congress or their staff. The media too, and anyone else who needs to know about the processes used to run accurate, secure and accessible elections in the U.S. With that in mind, the book is 100% descriptive, and 0% prescriptive.
For state-by-state data, NCSL and the EAC both provide up-to-the-minute resources that can and are changed as states adjust their processes.
Other Books on Election Administration
How We Vote by Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown (Georgetown University Press, 2020) comes close, but focuses on the election officials’ role and provides academic analysis. The same with Local Election Administrators in the United States: The Frontline of Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024), which gathers essays from leading scholars in the field of election science.
And there’s the venerable Election Administration in the United States, by Joseph P. Harris (Brookings Institution, 1934, now available as a PDF from the National Institute of Standards and Technology). While interesting to see that the issues identified in the 1930s are still with the nation almost a century later: who is eligible to vote and how do we know that; where and how voting takes place; how to secure processes and votes.
By Wendy Underhill, National Council of State Legislatures