Abstract
Jocelyn F. Benson, State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010, 170 pp., $89.95 (hardcover).
Secretaries of state have long been key players in election administration, but their role was far less prominent; indeed, many secretaries pre-2000 would have been all but anonymous but for the occasional election litigation bearing their names, e.g., Growe v. Emison, 507 U.S. 25 (1993) (redistricting case involving Minnesota Secretary Joan Growe), Eu v. S.F. Cty. Democratic Cent. Comm., 489 U.S. 214 (1989) (party endorsements case involving California Secretary March Fong Eu); Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (malapportionment/political question case involving Tennessee Secretary Joe Carr).
Of course, that all changed in 2000, when a combustible recipe of butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and a razor-thin presidential race thrust Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris into the spotlight as the face of the crisis facing the Sunshine State and the nation. In the immediate aftermath, secretaries became prominent voices in the election reform, led by Arkansas' Sharon Priest, then-president of the heretofore largely unknown National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS).
Secretaries' importance continued to be magnified as the decade progressed. Congress' enactment of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 gave state officials federal funding for a series of election administration mandates and tasked them with responsibility to see that they were implemented properly and on time. As the spotlight shone ever brighter, secretaries found themselves at the center of fierce and difficult debates about how the post-HAVA election world would work. No decision, it seemed—whether about voting technology, registration procedures, or voter identification—was too small to escape public (or at least media) notice.
In the next several years, the office of secretary of state became increasingly viewed as a political prize and political stepping-stone. The progressive Secretary of State Project came together to support “reform-minded” candidates (all Democrats), electing 9 of 11 in 2006 and 2008 combined. Colorado's Mike Coffman was elected to a U.S. House seat in 2008, and Arizona's Jan Brewer became governor when the elected incumbent was nominated to a position in the Obama administration.
The end result is that by 2010, secretaries of state were a big campaign story. Eleven sitting secretaries were candidates for higher office, and 26 states had open seats or re-election campaigns for secretary of state.
Jocelyn Benson, associate professor of law at Wayne State University, is well acquainted with election law and the growing prominence of secretaries of state. Her academic and professional careers have centered on studying and improving the electoral process; she lobbied for passage of HAVA as Voting Rights Policy Coordinator of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, was a key player in the Democratic Party's “election protection” efforts in 2004 and since then has been active in her home state of Michigan on issues of election administration reform. In 2009, she decided to throw her proverbial hat into the ring as a candidate for Michigan Secretary of State. She received the Democratic nomination and in November 2010 was defeated by GOP nominee (and Oakland County clerk) Ruth Johnson.
Before announcing her candidacy, however, Benson did what many diligent job applicants do: she conducted informational interviews with key players in the field. Thus, during a sabbatical from Wayne State in 2008, Benson met and talked to 30 secretaries of state about how they viewed their jobs and what they thought was most important about the position of secretary.
The end product of those interviews—other than the obvious “go” decision on her campaign—is Benson's new book State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process. In the book, Benson quotes at length from her interview notes, giving the reader unparalleled insight into the thought process of the women and men who serve as secretaries of state.
The subtitle (“Guardians of the Democratic Process”) is the first clue that that the book's first-person point of view will paint an almost heroic picture of secretaries of state. Chapter titles follow this theme, with secretaries described in part as Voter Advocate, Election Reformer, Voter Protector, and Enforcer. Interspersed between chapters are short, page-length bios offering brief glimpses into the motivation and personality of ten of her subjects.
What's remarkable is that while Benson's campaign made prominent mention of her authorship of the book, the document itself is not a partisan or policy manifesto but rather a careful treatment of her subject. In particular, Benson deserves kudos for the even-handed treatment she gives to the topic and her interviewees; her personal views are not at all apparent, which suggests that the book's relevance will outlive the 2010 election.
The key question, however, is how relevant Guardians of the Democratic Process will be. Indeed, the book already feels incomplete and a little dated, no matter how well researched and well written it is. Understanding why the book falls short says less about the quality of Benson's work (which is top-notch) than it does about our evolving understanding of the role and prominence of secretaries of state.
The biggest substantive weakness of Benson's treatment of her topic is the decision to overlook almost completely the relationship of secretaries of state to local election officials within a state. There is a brief, three-paragraph section on pp. 9–10 entitled “The Role of Local Election Officials” but it is just a toe-touch on the issue that concludes with this two-sentence observation that is accurate but not terribly illuminating:
The bottom line is that local election administrators are closest to the ground when it comes to running elections, and they certainly play a unique and important role in running elections. But in nearly every state they work either under the direction or influence of the statewide administrators who oversee them and the process.
I suspect this omission was intentional; as a candidate for Michigan Secretary of State, Benson knew that if elected she would be responsible for dealing with Michigan's hundreds of county, town and village election clerks—one of whom, Oakland clerk Ruth Johnson, was her general election opponent—and consequently may have decided that discretion was the better part of valor in describing the state/local relationship which would be a central characteristic of her service as secretary.
Nevertheless, a student of election administration who reads Benson's book for insights into how elections work in this country is getting only one part of the story, given the heavy emphasis on the view from the secretary's chair. This is not necessarily a bad thing; first-person accounts are incredibly useful in the proper context. For example, Richard Fenno's classic Home Style: House Members in their Districts (1978) is an indispensable (albeit anecdotal) examination of how congressmen see themselves and their constituencies and how that view shapes their behavior at home and on Capitol Hill. Benson's treatment of secretaries of state is strikingly similar to Fenno's so-called “soak and poke” approach, giving readers an insider's view that can be used to explain how these men and women think about what they do.
But Home Style was not Fenno's only study of House members, nor was it his first: Congressmen in Committees (1973) examined how incumbents navigate the complex social and policy environment of committees in service of their personal, professional, and political goals. Fenno's two books, in combination, provide a more sophisticated and nuanced explanation of House members as political and policy actors. Benson's book suffers from not having a similar counterpart that takes a more systemic view of the role and activity of secretaries of state. Until that counterpart is available, students of American election administration will have to find other sources to fill out their understanding of the people and institutions who make American elections work.
Another factor that contributes to Guardians' somewhat dated feel is mounting evidence that the office of secretary of state is no longer the plum it was once thought to be.
First, the job that Benson's subjects described to her (and she describes to her readers) is rapidly disappearing. The federal government has almost completely abandoned the role it appeared to establish with HAVA's passage; years of congressional underfunding and lackluster guidance from Washington have left states—and especially secretaries—with mounting costs and dwindling federal dollars. Local officials, who appeared to have been taken down a peg with HAVA's endorsement of a stronger state role in election administration, are now clashing with (or simply ignoring) secretaries of state as they decide how to proceed with decisions about voting technology, election procedures, and other aspects of the electoral process. More than ever, secretaries are confronting once again the problem of how to exercise responsibility for election administration without an accompanying level of authority to make their decisions stick.
Second, the job of secretary has proven to be a slippery political stepping stone at best. In the end, only two of the sitting secretaries of state who were candidates for higher state or federal office in 2010 succeeded—Indiana's Todd Rokita (who was term-limited) captured an open U.S. House seat and Louisiana's Jay Dardenne won a special election to become the state's lieutenant governor.
The 2010 election returns suggest that while the decade after the 2000 presidential election represented a high-water mark for secretaries of state—both in terms of actual authority and public visibility—those waters are now rapidly receding. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary phenomenon or whether, in fact, secretaries are returning to the relative anonymity they experienced pre-2000. Either way, the men and women who occupy the secretary's chair in the future are likely to face more challenges—and receive less acclaim—than most of Benson's subjects have experienced.
In summary, Jocelyn Benson's Guardians of the Democratic Process is a pitch-perfect representation of the turbulent years immediately post-2000 when banner headlines and a new federal law made secretaries of state the stars of U.S. election administration. Yet a current reader, from the vantage point of the end of the 2010 election cycle, is likely to get the feeling of looking back at a bygone (albeit recent) era in election administration. Consequently, the book is no longer as reliable a guide to the current and future role of secretaries in the American electoral process. Nevertheless, because of Benson's careful and balanced treatment of the subject—and her obvious respect and admiration for the women and men who run our nation's elections—the book should be a recommended “time capsule” reading for anyone who seeks to understand what America's system of voting looked like to contemporary participants in the decade following the disputed 2000 election.