...probably other phase of public Administration in the United States, which is so badly managed as the conduct of elections" (Harris, 1934, p. 1). The irony here is rich. Elections are where the public makes primary decisions that affect all citizens and all administrators. It is where public preferences manifest themselves in decisions about who will run all levels of government and, through the initiative and referenda process, even how the government will be run. Yet the history of election administration is one where frequently ill-equipped, poorly trained, part-time administrators have been trusted with managing this critical democratic function. (1)

After the 2000 presidential election, the current debate over election reform began, with a primary focus on voting equipment and on developing procedural remedies for flaws observed in the current election process. Consider, for example, the election reform legislation enacted by Congress--the "Help America Vote Act of 2002" (Public Law 107-252). This legislation was primarily designed to provide states with money to purchase new voting equipment and to encourage states to implement a series of specific procedures, such as statewide voter registration systems, voter education programs, and provisional voting (Liebschutz & Palazzolo, 2005; Alvarez & Hall, 2005).

This law and many national and state-level reform efforts (e.g., Governor's Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, Standards and Technology, 2001; National Commission on Federal Election Reform, 2002) typically focused on changing the current election system without considering whether the model of election administration that is used today is appropriate. (2) That is, why do most people vote at polling places on a single day at a single location? Why are voting places sometimes located in private homes and garages, or in private businesses? Why do volunteers or poorly paid people staff these polling places? What are the managerial complexities created by using such an election system? Are there other models for elections that would strengthen the ability of election administrators to control and manage the election process?

In this article, we use the logic of principal agency to analyze the problems that arise in the existing election system built around polling place voting on a single day. We then identify alternate means of serving voters that election administrators can employ to retain greater control over the election process. Using this theoretical construct, we consider the various components of poll site voting that administrators must manage in the current system and use cases from recent elections to illustrate the difficulties associated with managing each component of the system. We then explore how other means of serving voters--such as vote centers, vote-by-mail, early voting, and Internet voting--can allow election administrators to mitigate many of the serious agency problems associated with election administration. We conclude with a discussion of how administrators can use experimentation to test these administration techniques and present systematic data from Oregon and the United Kingdom to bolster this point.

Principal-Agent Theory

Principal-agent theory has been used extensively in public administration, implementation analysis, and political science to examine the problems associated with management and administration in a decentralized environment. (3) As Waterman and Meier (1998, p. 174) note, "the principal agent model ... is in essence a theory about contractual relationships between buyers and sellers." A critical management problem in most organizations is delegation. Delegation occurs when a principal--who wants an activity accomplished but cannot easily perform the task--instead hires an agent to accomplish the task. Unfortunately, just as principals cannot do the task themselves, they often have difficulty knowing if they hired the right person and whether the task is being accomplished appropriately.

The two problems--hiring the right agent and knowing that they will do the job appropriately--are known respectively as adverse selection and moral hazard. Moral hazards arise because the principal and agent often have conflicting goals and views of risk; the principal cannot assume the agent will act in the principal's best interest. This conflict is exacerbated because monitoring the actions of an agent can be costly. Adverse selection problems leave principals in the position of not knowing if they have hired the right person for the job and if the agent is actually who the person she has represented. (4) Key aspects of the principal-agent relationship are the discretion available to the agent, the specific charge given to the agent, and the formality of the agent's contract (Mitnick, 1980; Waterman & Meier, 1998).

Principal-agent problems are inherently information related, but they are not necessarily intransigent. As Thompson (1998) notes, corporations and governments are typically able to find satisfactory solutions to principal-agent problems; business and governments prosper even in the face of these problems. The four strategies that are typically employed by principals to overcome this information asymmetry are (i) contracting, (ii) candidate screening requirements, (iii) monitoring requirements, and (iiii) institutional checks. However, not all administrative structures and not all problems allow for these mitigation strategies to be easily implemented. The administration of elections is an example of a policy area that has complicated principal-agent problems that are not easily resolved.

Designing contracts between principals and agents is complicated because both sides have an incentive to ensure that the contract maximizes their own position (e.g., Donahue, 1989, especially ch. 5; Kiewiet & McCubbins, 1991, ch. 2). Cooper (2003) has shown that governments rarely have the resources necessary to achieve their contractual goals. From the principal's perspective, the contract should constrain the agent's ability to act contrary to the goals of the principal, and maximize the amount of work that the agent will be completing. Designing appropriate contracts is difficult, and even with one, it can be costly for the principal to enforce the terms of the contract and to gather the necessary information to ensure that the agent is fulfilling its end of the agreement.

A well-designed contract is of limited benefit if the organization cannot overcome adverse selection problems. Given the costs associated with collecting meaningful performance data after an agent has been hired, it is important to hire the right person at the outset. However, developing an effective screening process can also be exceedingly difficult. Just as there is a "lemon" problem in the used-car market, underqualified candidates apply for jobs that maximize their pay relative to their skills (e.g., Akerlof, 1970). Principals must spend valuable resources to pierce the veil of deception that agents have an incentive to cloak themselves within.

The difficulties associated with contracting and the adverse selection problem leads many principals to implement monitoring requirements, with performance reports and the like being commonly used (Hall & O'Toole, 2000). There are many techniques for determining if agents are acting appropriately (e.g., Banks, 1989; Banks & Weingast, 1992; Bendor, Taylor, & van Gaalen, 1987), but each technique is costly. Monitoring takes time and other resources away from achieving the goal that is being monitored, and principals can end up flooded with information that they must sort through to determine if agents are behaving appropriately. Also, it can take a significant amount of time for the principal to observe whether the agent is actually acting consistently with job expectations.

Institutional mechanisms can also be enacted to limit the ability of agents to act outside the interest of principals. The most common type of check is to limit the ability of the agent to act unilaterally. Requiring agents to receive sign-off before acting and requiring multiple actors to agree on a single decision are examples of this sort of institutional check. The goal behind these institutional checks is to limit the damage that an agent can do if they decide to directly act against the interests of the organization.

Our interest is in considering whether the problems identified through principal-agent theory can be easily mitigated in the context of American election administration. We specifically focus on four aspects of the principal-agent model:

1. The principal-agent dilemma can be eliminated if the principal chooses not to delegate.

2. The methods available to principals for minimizing the effects of the principal-agent dilemma--contracting, monitoring, and the like--require time to pass so that the agent can act and these actions can be evaluated.

3. Overcoming the adverse selection problem requires a large pool of potential agents from which to select, so the principal is in a position to reject all unqualified agents.

4. The ability of the principal to negotiate successfully with agents is contingent on the ability of the principal having resources with which to negotiate. A contract, by definition, requires both sides to agree on terms. Any leverage that the principal can have over the agent is likely to bring the negotiations to a resolution.

With this principal-agent framework in place, we can apply it to various models of election implementation in order to determine the factors that alleviate or exacerbate the ability of local election officials to control the election management process. In the next section, we apply this framework to the traditional poll site voting model and show how it creates a series of principal-agent problems that produce significant difficulties for election administration. We...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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