Lessons from the 2012 Election Administration and Voting Survey

Abstract

Since our country’s inception, collecting appropriate data on elections and the administration of elections has been somewhat problematic, due to the fact that multiple levels of government are involved in running elections in the U.S. and because of difficulties in obtaining comparable information from the different states and localities. Beginning with the 2004 elections, the Election Assistance Commission has conducted national surveys of election administrators in an effort to facilitate a better understanding of how U.S. elections are run. We rely on these data for the 2012 and 2008 elections to offer some baseline assessments of how (rather than for whom) Americans voted in the most recent presidential elections, as well as how the way in which Americans vote might be changing.