In April 2009, Heather Gerken (Yale Law School) released The Democracy Index (Princeton University Press), in which she proposes a straightforward, innovative solution to improving the U.S. elections system: an index that would rate and compare the performance of elections systems at the state and local levels. The book has its genesis in a paper Professor Gerken developed at a Tobin Project working group meeting with Congressional lawmakers in 2006. In 2007, less than a year after being proposed by Professor Gerken, the creation of a Democracy Index was included in legislation introduced by then-Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and then endorsed by the General Counsel of both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns. Then, in 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that New York City would create the nation’s first Democracy Index, and Congressman Steve Israel put the bill into legislation in 2010. ;xNLx;;xNLx;“The Tobin Project played a crucial role in helping get the idea for the Democracy Index out. I'm not sure if I would have written up the paper were it not for the conference we had on the Hill. The conference forced me to think in more pragmatic terms than I usually do, and once I started thinking harder about the issue the idea just took off.”;xNLx;- Heather Gerken (Yale Law School) ;xNLx;;xNLx; ;xNLx;