America’s Election Day Evolution

On the eve of another election, in addition to the party and candidate messages, there is a familiar air of dispute over how we run elections. Various states are considering mid-decade redistricting, and parties are disputing issues of voting technology, mail-in ballots, and noncitizens on the voting rolls. Despite what the presence of these debates in each election cycle might imply, America has dramatically improved its election system over the past few decades. Issues remain, but understanding them requires a look at the problems we have already resolved.

For many Americans, our current focus on election administration began 25 years ago, during the 2000 Bush versus Gore election, when the country got an education in election administration. This look behind the curtain of running elections was not pretty. The long recount process, court challenges, and political posturing revealed ballot design issues, inconsistent vote-counting standards, and questions about registration and overseas voters. It also unleashed a cacophony of conflicting information from various federal and state courts, local and state election administrators, and other public officials. Before 2000, average Americans thought little about these matters, and even the fields of election law and political science had mostly ignored the running of elections as a subject of study.

A long recount to decide the presidency in many other states would have revealed similar issues.

The good news, however, is that in the intervening 25 years, the way we run elections has changed dramatically for the better. Florida was not the only state that had imperfect election administration in 2000. A long recount to decide the presidency in many other states would have revealed similar issues. But to Florida’s credit, a sustained process of reform and improvement has now made it one of the model states for election administration.

In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, Congress passed the bipartisan Help America Vote Act (HAVA). While impactful, this act was not a perfect piece of legislation, nor is it the sole reason for the dramatic changes we have seen since. But its passage—a substantial and truly bipartisan piece of legislation that emerged from a hotly disputed presidential election, roiled by a weeks-long recount and polarizing Supreme Court decision—was a feat that is hard to imagine today.

Among other things, HAVA provided billions of dollars to upgrade election technology (the first federal money ever spent on election administration), designed a process to develop voting technology standards for manufacturers, required states to upgrade their voter registration systems, and gave voters safeguards such as provisional ballots and error-checking mechanisms.

Tackling Voting Tech

The first area where American elections have seen dramatic improvement is in voting technology. In the 2000 election, a variety of election technologies proliferated. Infamously, punch card machines required the voter to punch out a perforated hole next to their candidate of choice. The resulting “hanging chads,” in which the ballot hole was not made cleanly and the paper chad hung on to the hole, and “pregnant chads,” in which a dimple was made but the ballot paper was not penetrated, came into the common lexicon during the recount. More troubling were the varying counting standards to deal with these anomalies and the potential deterioration of ballots in the counting process.

Other older technologies were banned, like lever machines, in which a voter would indicate their candidate of choice by moving levers on the wall of a physically imposing machine with a mechanically operated privacy curtain. The technology was loved by some voters, but in the end, the machines had no backup record of a vote, and the physical mechanisms were subject to breakage, sometimes unbeknownst to the voter and election officials, potentially losing votes not recorded properly.

The biggest changes to voting technology were initiated by HAVA, which essentially banned all voting technologies but two: scanning devices, similar to the machines that scan the results of multiple-choice tests on paper, and direct recording devices, which require an input on a screen like an ATM. The act provided billions of dollars for state and local jurisdictions to purchase new machines, often replacing years-old technologies.

But voting technology development took an unexpected turn after many of the initial systems were purchased and deployed. Critics in the voting world and the computer science community expressed concerns about the direct recording devices. In particular, they worried that, with only a touch screen entry, there was no paper record that voters could see and election officials could ultimately count, recount, and audit.

Today, the vast majority of votes cast (over 90 percent) have a paper record, and the remaining legacy direct-recording devices are likely on their way out in the next few years.

After the initial burst of purchases of these direct recording devices, the calls for a paper trail or paper backup won the day. These direct recording devices were either retrofitted to include a paper record that the voter could see or abandoned altogether in favor of scanning devices, in which a paper ballot is created, scanned by a machine, and retained. Today, the vast majority of votes cast (over 90 percent) have a paper record, and the remaining legacy direct-recording devices are likely on their way out in the next few years.

HAVA also initiated a process by which the testing and certification of voting technology could be improved. In 2000, voting technology standards were in a much less developed and formalized state. Some states had standards, and professional election administration associations made valiant efforts to develop standards. But HAVA created the US Election Assistance Commission—which, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and advisers from across the country, develops voluntary standards. Many states use these standards in whole or in part.

These improvements have led to tangible results. After the 2000 election, experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology looked at the existing infrastructure and found it was losing many votes due to errors. Millions of ballots were thrown out due to “overvoting,” in which a voter selects two candidates for a race. Many others were potentially lost in “undervotes,” or ballot lines left blank or with marks that the voting technology did not pick up. Today, with the improvement of voting technology and HAVA’s requirement for systems that catch overvotes and sometimes identify undervotes, millions of ballots that would not have been counted before 2000 are successfully cast.

There are still issues with voting technology, and there is room for vigilance in looking for flaws in current technology and developing even better systems in the future. But we now have a country with many more ballots counted, improved standards and testing, and a paper backup for nearly all ballots.

Revamping Voter Registration

Beyond the voting technology itself, the way we register voters has matured substantially in recent decades. In 2000, only seven states had statewide, computerized voter registration systems. HAVA mandated that all states move toward these systems, and today, all states have since met this objective.

This improved infrastructure means that states can better keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date. The systems may also allow states to have a live connection to the voter registration database, facilitating services like check-in at polling locations. And it allows for the possibilities of vote centers, allowing voters to choose a location in their county to vote early, alleviating long lines on Election Day.

There are still many issues with voter registration, including how we perform voter list maintenance, the ways we register voters, and how we identify noncitizens on voting rolls. There is also no formal way to share data across states, even though some states do so voluntarily. But the leap forward since 2000 has been dramatic, and the computerization of our lists sets the stage for potential future improvements in all these areas.

Bolstering Mail-Ins Ballots and Early Voting

A development not directly related to the 2000 election is the growing adoption of voting by mail and early voting in person at polling sites.

Since the 2000 election, the numbers for mail-in voting and early voting in person have continued to rise.

In 2000, we were near the beginning of a trend toward greater mail-in and early voting in person—a trend that has only accelerated in ensuing years. In 2000, approximately 10 percent of the country voted by mail, and another 4 percent voted early at polling places. This was up from the pattern that prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century, when less than 5 percent of voters cast absentee ballots and we had no measures of the small amounts of early voting at polling places. States in the West, starting with California, introduced no-excuse absentee voting in 1978. Two decades later, Oregon was the first state to adopt 100 percent mail-in voting. In the 1990s, Texas and Tennessee started some of the first early-voting programs at polling places at scale.

Since the 2000 election, the numbers for mail-in voting and early voting in person have continued to rise. By 2016, about 41 percent of voters voted before Election Day, including 24 percent by mail and 17 percent early in person. Then, in 2020, during the global pandemic, the numbers for voting by mail rose dramatically. Over 40 percent voted by mail and over 25 percent voted early in person.

It was not until 2024 that we saw something of a return to non-pandemic trends. Voting on Election Day was barely the most common form of voting. Early in-person voting saw a strong rise, and mail-in voting dropped from 2020 levels but still showed an increase over 2016 levels. We are a country now where the three modes of voting are relatively comparable.

Recognizing Progress

These dramatic changes have supporters and critics. Especially in 2000, the issue of voting by mail became much more polarized, with Democrats seeing it as their preferred mode of voting and Republicans expressing significant distrust. These views have receded from their 2000 high points, but the differences are still noticeable.

But if we look below the national numbers to the states’, we see a great variety of arrangements. A number of states, especially in the West, now have significant numbers of mail-in voting. Some Southern states, notably Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, have moved to a regime with high levels of early voting in person and small amounts of mail-in voting. And many others have a mix of methods.

As we go to the polls this November, and debate over election administration swirls around us, it is imperative to recognize how modern voting technology, improved registration systems, and the expansion of new modes of voting have sharpened elections across our nation. There is always room to grow, but continuing to improve our election system begins with recognizing how we have already done so.

John C. Fortier is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on Congress and elections, election administration, election demographics, voting, the US presidency, and the Electoral College.