Last April, soon after I accepted Stanford’s offer to join its faculty, I received a call from Robert Bauer and Ben Ginsberg, the lawyers who had represented President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. They had been tasked by the president with chairing a bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration and asked me to be its senior research director. The timing, of course, could not have been worse, as I was planning imminently to move my family 3,000 miles away from Washington, D.C. But chances like these to do work in my area of academic interest that might have a national impact, let alone the opportunity to work with two of the country’s top political lawyers, do not come around that often. So I eagerly signed up for the task.

On Election Day 2012, when stories of long lines, particularly in (where else?) Florida, dominated the news, President Obama in his acceptance speech famously ad-libbed “we have to fix that.” In his State of the Union Speech three months later, he announced the formation of the Presidential Commission with Bauer and Ginsberg as co-chairs. According to the Executive Order that created the commission, not only would it look into the “lines problem” but its jurisdiction would cover a whole panoply of election administration issues, such as ballot design and technology, absentee and provisional ballots, voter registration, polling places, poll workers, and special problems faced by discrete populations such as voters with disabilities or limited English proficiency and overseas and military voters. The commission was tasked with submitting its report to the president within six months of its first hearing, which took place in Miami on June 21, 2013.

Over the next half-year, Bauer, Ginsberg, and I, along with eight other commissioners appointed by the president, toured the country to gather information about America’s dysfunctional system of election administration. The commission held hearings in Miami, Denver, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, which featured testimony from election administrators, academics, and the general public. Our investigation did not stop there, however. We met with dozens of groups—civil rights organizations, professional associations, and partisan groups—to hear their concerns, experiences, and suggestions for the commission.

Our travels stretched from Florida to Alaska—literally across the entire country. We heard from Alaskan Native tribes about the unique voting problems they face given the inaccessibility of their communities to most forms of transportation and communication, their lack of a written language, and the inhospitable weather during election season. We went to Walt Disney World in Orlando, because the head of Disney Theme Parks was also on the commission, to hear from the experts how they deal with long lines at their rides and attractions. And we met with all the major vendors of voting equipment to hear about the political, economic, and technological challenges they face in trying to bring the next generation of voting machines to market.

At the same time as the commission conducted its hearings, Stanford Law students in my policy lab on election administration were producing research on many of the topics in the Executive Order.

Eight students wrote a series of research memos on problems in election administration on topics as diverse as military voting, ballot design, provisional ballots, and voter registration. They synthesized several thousand pages of secondary research into digestible memos that helped the commissioners understand the available social science on the topics of interest.

From these months of hearings, research, outreach, and input, the commission decided on a set of recommendations contained in a 100-plus-page report delivered to the president when we met with him on January 23, 2014. The principal recommendations of the report call for

•modernization of the registration process through continued expansion of online voter registration and expanded state collaboration in improving the accuracy of voter lists;

•measures to improve access to the polls through expansion of the period for voting before the traditional Election Day, and through the selection of suitable, well-equipped polling place facilities, such as schools;

•state-of-the-art techniques to assure efficient management of polling places, including web-based tools the commission publicized on its website, www.supportthevoter.gov;

•reforms of the standard-setting and certification process for new voting technology to address soon-to-be antiquated voting machines and to encourage innovation and the adoption of widely available off-the-shelf technologies.

To my surprise, given the heightened political sensitivities concerning election reform, the report has received bipartisan praise and support. Although the success of the commission will be determined by the rate of adoption of these reforms, the mere fact that the commission acting unanimously could put forward substantive proposals in the current environment of extreme partisan polarization is an accomplishment unto itself.

With any luck, the report not only will lead to changes in the way we conduct our elections, but it might provide some glimmer of hope on how to overcome the obstacles of our current state of political dysfunction to get things done.  SL