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12 Election L.J. 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/enlwjr12 and id is 1 raw text is: The Party Line: The Value of Election Observation Paul Gronke and Daniel Tokaji L EGAL AND POLICY EVALUATIONS of election administration practices often depend on key pieces of evidence that aren't yet available. A well-worn example is the fact that, until just a few years ago, we did not know precisely how many American citizens actually turned out to vote. Some jurisdictions continued to report turnout as the total number of votes cast for the highest office on the ballot, even though some voters skip this con- test. Even if that number is very small, it was sur- prising that, in the third century of American democracy, this most basic indicator of the perfor- mance of our elections system-how many citizens actually cast a ballot-was not known precisely. Happily, efforts to improve the completeness and consistency of information about elections have yielded tremendous improvements in the past decade. This is reflected in a burst of scholar- ship on election administration in the U.S. We have also seen increased reliance on social scien- tific analyses in election litigation regarding such matters as voting technology, early voting, and voter identification. Despite these improvements, there is one aspect of election studies where the United States lags well behind the rest of the world: election observation. International governmental organi- zations like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the European Union regularly send teams of election observers to measure, monitor, and evaluate election conduct throughout the globe. These efforts are comple- mented by the efforts of observers attached to non-governmental organizations, some interna- tional and some domestic, some well known like the Carter Center or the National Democratic Institute, and some nearly invisible. Collectively, the information gathered by these organizations serves as an invaluable resource for evaluating, comparing, and improving election performance. In the United States, however, systematic use of election observation remains the exception rather than the norm. Election Law Journal published one of the first scientific studies based on informa- tion gleaned from election observation, Long Lines at Polling Stations? Observations from an Election Day Field Study, coauthored by Douglas Spencer and Zachary Markovits. But there is little published research arising from the observation of U.S. elections. In stark contrast, the study and practice of inter- national election observation is nearly an academic specialty. New academic initiatives such as the Electoral Integrity Project, a research partnership between the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University, the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and the Project on International Election Monitor- ing at Duke University, signal growing scholarly interest in the field. In this issue, we are fortunate to have Emily Beaulieu, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky and author of the forthcoming book Electoral Protest and Democracy in the Developing World, serve as guest co-editor for a symposium on international election observa- tion. As Professor Beaulieu notes in her intro- duction, international election observation, or monitoring, has become an international norm. What remains a topic for debate and reflection is what contribution observation ultimately makes to the quality of the democratic experience. In consultation with Professor Beaulieu, we deci- ded that readers of the Journal would benefit most from reflections about election observation from practitioners in the field. She has assembled an 1 ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 12, Number 1, 2013 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2013.1211 Editorial

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