"Celebrating" the Tenth Anniversary of the 2000 Election Controversy: What the World Can Learn from the Recent History of Election Dysfunction in the United States

Abstract

the 2000 presidential election represented a watershed event. It humbled those who thought that the world's leading democracy had mastered the mechanics of running an election. It also generated interest to look outward for best practices and models to emulate. When U.S. scholars and reformers did so, however, we realized that certain intransigent structural features of the U.S. political system made reform particularly challenging. By highlighting these obstacles, however, this exploration of different modes of administration lent itself to an assessment of the various dimensions of the that all democracies encounter. This Article describes the multiple facets ofthe election administration problem that all democracies confront, in light ofthe decade ofintrospection the United States has undertaken. This Article begins by summarizing the controversy that led to the current era of reform of the U.S. electoral system. It then moves to a discussion of the categories of administrative and technical challenges that all successful democracies must confront on some level. It then concludes with a description of metrics by which we can measure democratic success. Before entering into that discussion, it may be worth summarizing three features of the U.S. electoral system which exist to a greater or lesser extent in other countries, but which, in combination, make reform particularly formidable for the United States. The first glaring institutional feature evident to even the most casual observer ofthe U.S. electoral system is the extreme decentralization ofadministrative responsibilities and policymaking. 1 Most decisions concerning