People Versus Places: The Unrepresentative Nature of Local Election Administration

We investigate whether the structure of local government causes a distortion in the views of local election administrators. Using original surveys of local election clerks and the public in Wisconsin to analyze opinions about election practices, we consider how these opinions are manifest when jurisdictions are weighted to reflect the distribution of the population rather than the distribution of local governments. On several questions we find substantial discrepancies between the two ways of measuring administrator preferences, more so when the practices in question affect the voter experience than when they affect the mechanics of administration alone. Our results show a preference for the status quo tends to dominate in the latter domain. We also find that administrator opinion, when weighted by population, is further from the public’s views rather than closer to it, a pattern we attribute to the greater professionalization of officials from larger jurisdictions. We conclude with implications for policymaking in the field of elections and a more dedicated balancing between establishing statewide uniformity and setting minimum statewide standards that allow for local innovation.