Saving American Elections: A Diagnosis and Prescription for a He ...

Chapter 1

Symptoms

As a political scientist who has spent his career studying elections, I have often struggled with the practical implications of all the research election scholars have done—with the question of how best to improve elections in the United States, given what we know. This desire to use what we know to facilitate better elections has driven me to help defend some election reforms in the courts⁶ and ultimately to write this book. In considering how exactly U.S. elections might be rehabilitated, I was amazed and a bit overwhelmed by the vast number of ideas that aim to do just that, as well as by how many of them seem, at first glance, to be good ideas. Therefore I began thinking about how one might sort through all of these ideas: how can one know, beyond assessing each individual proposal on its own, what will work, what elections in the United States truly need in order to make them “healthier”? Then the obvious struck me: before trying to figure out how to fix U.S. elections, it might help to first understand precisely what is wrong with them. In other words, what is needed is a full diagnosis of the problem before anyone tries to solve it. Just as no good medical doctor would prescribe remedies without