Commentary: Understanding the Polling Place Experience

• Author: Sean Greene,Brian D. Newby
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12747
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

364 Public Administration Review • May | June 2017

Sean Greene is program management

specialist at the U.S. Election Assistance

Commission, overseeing research including

the Election Administration and Voting

Survey. Previously, he managed the research

of the Election Initiatives program as project

director at Pew Charitable Trusts.

E-mail: sgreene@eac.gov

Brian D. Newby has been executive

director of the U.S. Election Assistance

Commission since 2015. For 11 years prior

to that, he served as election commissioner

in Johnson County, Kansas, the only one to

have been appointed by both Republican

and Democratic secretaries of state.

E-mail: bnewby@eac.gov

Commentary

E lections produce an incredible amount of data.

There are thousands of election jurisdictions

in the United States that administer the voting

process, and ballots are cast for more offices than

one can imagine, from mosquito control boards to

county coroner to county drain commissioner. Each

of these elections and races generates numbers: how

many people voted, how many votes each candidate

received, how people cast their ballots—early in

person, by mail, on Election Day—and on and on.

Yet for all these data, it is still challenging to capture

the actual experience of voters and poll workers at the

polling place.

In their article “What Happens at the Polling Place:

Using Administrative Data to Look Inside Elections,”

Barry C. Burden, David T. Canon, Kenneth R. Mayer,

Donald P. Moynihan, and Jacob R. Neiheisel take a

new approach and use a mostly untapped data set—

administrative data about Election Day activity—to

open up that experience and better demonstrate what

happens at the polling place.

While the authors’ specific findings are compelling,

we would argue there are three higher-level points that

are worth highlighting: (1) the focus on administrative

data, (2) stressing how trade-offs in decision making

Brian D. Newby

Sean Greene

U.S. Election Assistance Commission

Understanding the Polling Place Experience