This brief provides recommendations for the U.S. Department of Justice Election Threats Task Force aimed at strengthening protections for election workers against threats of violence. Recommendations include issuing additional guidance for law enforcement, noting the limitations of federal laws protecting election officials and addressing them as well as identifying alternatives to criminal prosecution to help deter threats and esnure the safety of election workers.
Resources
Use our resource library to explore the latest research in the field of election science.
This report provides a national overview of post-election audits, audit types, history, and state practices across the United States.
This report discusses ballot-accounting audits as a complementary check to tabulation audits, emphasizing reconciliation and chain of custody.
This paper shows how reporting data at the ballot-card level can reduce risk limiting audits sample sizes and improve audit efficiency.
The guide provides a basic framework for testing risk limiting audits in diverse contexts by outlining foundational prerequisites and operational, legal and regulatory considerations
Research shows that printed ballots pose challenges for blind voters and low-vision voters, who cannot read them directly.
This is a report of a project examining the legibility of summary ballots printed by ballot marking devices. The goal of the investigation was to to identify aspects of design, layout, or typography that can make a summary-style ballot easier to read and to increase the likelihood that voters detect a mistake or change on their ballot.
In this paper, authors examine the effects of automatic voter registration (AVR) on both registration and turnout. They find that ind it does raise registration rates substantially, that the effect of AVR gradually builds the longer it is in place, and that the different types of AVR have significantly different effects on both registration and turnout.
In this article, authors argue that supported decision making is ideal for people with dynamic cognitive and functional impairments that place them at the margins of autonomy. This research supports the idea that people with cognitive
disabilities can make important decisions such as voting while relying on trusted assistors in executing those decisions.
This report examines election-related hurdles that hinder or prevent people with disabilities from participating fully in U.S. elections, including during the 2020 election cycle. It offers recommendations that policymakers can adopt to improve election accessibility for voters with disabilities.
This academic article studies how messages from political elites influence public confidence in elections and acceptance of democratic norms.
This research finds that a majority of Trump voters in the survey sample falsely believed that election fraud was widespread, and that Trump won the election. It also finds that Trump conceding or losing his legal challenges would likely lead a majority of Trump voters to accept Biden’s victory as legitimate, although 40% said they would continue to view Biden as illegitimate regardless.
Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, this paper that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship.