By Wendy Underhill

With all we’re hearing about ballot counting and recounting in Florida, it’s a good thing there’s an online state election e-benchbook for the Sunshine State.

(The latest from Florida as of Thursday morning: A judge has given thousands of voters whose ballots were rejected extra time to fix the problems. This is the first state to have more than one statewide office face recounts at once.)

Before running across this resource, I’d never heard of a  benchbook. If you also are not an attorney, the term is likely new for you too. A benchbook, turns out, is a compilation of statute, legal decisions and annotations on a given legal topic, often put together by a law clerk at the request of a judge. The intent is to assist in the disposition of cases.

And a “state election e-benchbook”? It is a publicly available, neutral, soup-to-nuts resource on election law, or rather on candidate filings to recounts and other post-election intricacies. The e-benchbooks cover campaign finance and political party regulations as well.

Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia all have e-benchbooks, with more states in the works, under the management of the William & Mary Law School and the National Center for State Courts.

The publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took 49 years (1879–1928). That means that patience is called for as the other 45 states (and the territories) get their e-benchbooks.

Rebecca Green, director of William and Mary’s election law program, told me that which states are added is partly based on resources, but also on signs of interest from the state. Each new e-benchbook is built with a state-specific committee including an election administrator, an academic, and lawyers who work for Republicans and others who work for Democrats. Of course, the more states that are added, the more robust the e-benchbook project will be.

The first goal in a new state is to publish the statutes online in the e-benchbook format. After that, the committees get busy, adding case law and annotations. “We have them annotate the law between elections, so they aren’t defending any given position,” Green says. “They are all agreeing to what the law is before a dispute arises.” When an election dispute does arise, judges can refer to the e-benchbook, and read the annotations, both from the Rs and the Ds.

I don’t know whether anyone who is involved in the post-midterm procedures and legal challenges in Florida is using the e-benchbook, but if not, they’re missing out. (Ditto for journalists there: This is an authoritative resource.)

Legislators from one of the covered states can review their e-benchbook to get an overview of everything election-related. Where a statute led to disagreement among committee members, as evidenced by many annotations, it “could be a signal to legislators to shore up the law,” Green says. In other words, it could be used to find places where clarity is needed and can be fixed, as well as judicially, after a problem hits.

Legislators from other states who have a particular interest—say, in how to update their recount laws—could go to the e-benchbooks from all the states for ideas. Or, they can come to NCSL’s elections team, and we can do the digging for you.

Wendy Underhill is NCSL’s director for elections and redistricting.

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