Implementing HAVA's Voter Education Requirement: A Crisis and a Federal Mandate Improve State-Local Cooperation in Florida

The political fallout from the presidential election of 2000 that landed on both state and local officials, HAVA's broadly written voter education requirement giving the state great latitude in defining education, and the act's block-grant funding allowing more programmatic decisions to be made by county supervisors of elections each played a role in improving voter education in Florida. Relationships between state and local election officials also improved, even though the state legislature expanded the rule-making and coordination roles of the state Division of Elections. Voter education efforts in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, much more extensive than in 2000, were judged to be quite effective by both the voters and the county election supervisors. Improvements in voter confidence and participation paralleled the expanded voter education efforts in this highly competitive battleground state. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.