Biography
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public and International Affairs at the University of Utah. I teach courses in public policy and administration in the Master's of Public Administration and Master's of Public Policy programs. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. I am originally from Georgia, but have also lived in Washington, D.C. several times. From 2000 to 2004, I worked for The Century Foundation on issues associated with election reform and the Internet. I also worked for the Southern Governors' Association and for Governor Zell Miller in Georgia from 1990-1994.
You can download my vita here.
Current Research on Election Reform
My primary research interest is in the administration of elections and the implementation of voting technologies. I work closely on this with R. Michael Alvarez, and our day-to-day work on election reform can be found on our election blog: http://electionupdates.caltech.edu.
My book with Mike Alvarez at Caltech, Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promises of Digital Democracy, is available from Princeton University Press. We also published an edited book, Election Fraud (co-edited with Susan Hyde at Yale University), that is available from the Brookings Institution Press.
In 2004, I coauthored Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting (2004, Brookings Institution Press) with Mike Alvarez at Caltech. More recently, we have worked with Alexander Trechsel and others from Europe to study Internet voting in Estonia. We have written a report on the 2007 Internet elections in Estonia for the Council of Europe and we have a forthcoming article in PS: Political Science and Politics.
I am currently the co-principal investigator on several projects for the Pew Charitable Trust's Make Voting Work Initiative. I am also principal investigator of the Election Assistance Commission's Vote Count and Vote Recount Study, which examines election procedures and laws in all 50 states and Washington DC related to voting and vote recounts. I testified before the EAC in April and May 2006 on this project.
I have co-authored articles on election administration and reform either published or forthcoming in several journals, including the Journal of Politics, Policy Studies Journal, and P.S.: Political Science and Politics. Several of these papers, and other working papers on election administration, can be found on the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project's website as well as on the IPIA working papers website. These papers examine issues associated with the difficulties of administering elections at poll sites, the difficulties associated with voting encountered by UOCAVA voters-voters who live overseas or are in the military (or are military dependents). A report I coauthored on public attitudes toward electronic voting was published by CPPA.
In the report on election governance that I coauthored, we find that the public has strong support for having elections governed by nonpartisan boards instead of partisan individuals. I also just completed a co-authored report for IBM examining the need for electronic data exchange standards for election administration systems. I testified before the Election Assistance Commission regarding these standards at their July 28, 2005 meeting in Pasadena, California. In 2003, I testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee regarding elections in the aftermath of a terrorist event.
Here are some key research questions we are working on and links to the relevant papers
- POLL WORKERS: I have worked with Quin Monson and Kelly Patterson at BYU to survey poll workers and determine their attributes and the importance of training in effective election administration. One of our papers on this was published in PS.
- VOTER CONFIDENCE: I have written two papers on voter confidence with Mike Alvarez and Morgan Llewellyn; the most detailed is in JOP. We also have a really interesting working paper on voter confidence in the context of winning.
- I am also doing research with several people on the voting experience, examining elections holistically. A report illustrating this concept is here. Also, we will be doing a set of papers in this over the next year using survey data from the 2008 general election and from Super Tuesday.
- I am studying the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the elections in New Orleans. This work combines geographers and political scientists and uses GIS technology to analyze these issues.
I have also participated in several conferences recently on election reform. In 2006, I have given presentations at conferences on Internet voting in Estonia and Lithuania, voter registration in Boston for the VTP, and election reform at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005, I attended the National Academies of Science conference on election reform. In 2004 I was an invited participant at a conference on electronic voting by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This conference focused on the need for a strong research agenda for the study of elections, including new electronic voting technologies. The report from this meeting can be found here. I also participated in the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project's conference on electronic voting in Boston in 2004 and in Pasadena, California in 2001.
Other Research on Public Policy
Although election administration is my main research focus, I also study the policy process more broadly. My book Authorizing Policy, was published in October 2004 by the Ohio State University Press. I am also working with Scott Ainsworth on a project related to abortion politics in Congress. Finally, Anne Luecke and I are doing a series of papers examining comparative public administration and policy questions. My work on congress and administration has been published in Administration and Society, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Public Integrity. I also published "Live Bureaucrats and Dead Public Servants," which won the Brownlow Award for the best article by a practitioner in Public Administration Review.