How to run the next election: advice from three experts.

• Author: Underhill, Wendy

It's no surprise that 2012 brought a bumper crop of books about how to improve elections; a presidential election year is always a good time to sell books about elections. The best time to use a good book about elections, though, is in the year after the election. That's when legislatures gear up for the next go-'round.

Three 2012 books--from across the political spectrum make good reading for legislators. All three describe perceived weak points of America's decentralized election administration system; all three also offer prescriptions for building a stronger system. Better yet, there is greater overlap in these recommendations than the cover blurbs might imply.

Starting on the left, "The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans' Right to Vote" by Tova Wang (Century Foundation, 2012) looks through the lens of what she calls "the voter inclusion principle." Whatever the issue, she says "we should err on the side of greater access and equity unless there is a strong reason, based on demonstrable data and facts--not presumptions or prognostications-that it is not worth it." Wang applies the voter inclusion principle to voter registration regulations, pre-Election Day voting, polling place operations, procedures for handling absentee and provisional ballots, and voting rights for felons who have served their time.

It's quite likely that not everyone will agree that "voter inclusion" is the highest value when it comes to elections policy. Indeed, in "Who's Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk" (Encounter Books, 2012) right-leaning authors John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky place the highest value on the integrity of the election system. They say "some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design." And so, the book addresses every part of the voting system, just as Wang's book does.

And from between the two comes "The Voting Wars: From Florida to the Next Election Meltdown" by Richard L. Hasen (Yale University Press, 2012). (Readers, please take a moment to be thankful that 2012 was not the year of "the next election meltdown.") Hasen asks, "Why haven't things improved since the meltdown in 2000? Why has the situation in fact grown worse?" He then identifies his book as "the story of lessons not learned." He, too, looks at many parts of the system, from the creation of voting rolls in the first place to litigation in the...