Resources

This MIT Election Data + Science Lab analysis explains the 2020 “blue shift,” where later-counted ballots disproportionately favored Democrats, and why that pattern mattered for public interpretation of results.

This survey report focuses on election misinformation, fraud narratives, or public misperceptions and their effects on confidence in U.S. elections. It is relevant because beliefs about fraud and exposure to misleading claims are central mechanisms through which confidence in election outcomes rises or falls. For this dataset, it helps explain why the 2020 election became a turning point in public debates over fraud, mail voting, certification, and legitimacy.

This evaluation report examines philanthropy & trust-building in relation to the entry’s stated focus on election security; confidence; field-building. It is relevant to the dataset because it connects election rules, information environments, or administrative performance to public confidence and perceived legitimacy.

This research analyzes registrants in Wisconsin who were identified as potential movers and did not respond to a subsequent postcard. At least 4% of these registrants cast a ballot at their address of registration, with minority registrants twice as likely as white registrants to do so.

This book examines the dynamics behind shifts in voter registration rates across the states.

In this paper, authors match a high-quality, random sample of the U.S. population to multiple lists revealing that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is not on a voter list. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address).

In this paper, authors use snapshots of voter registration files (VRF) over time and machine learning models to test the effectiveness of unsupervised anomaly detection methods in detecting VRF modifications. They find that statistical models comparing administrative districts within a short time span and non-negative matrix factorization are most effective for surfacing anomalous events for review.

Even before the 2020 election, this reseach finds that voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Cooperative Election Study (CES), authors find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.

Research finds adopting VBM increases turnout because it reduces the physical costs of voting for all voters and mitigates the information costs of voting conditional on the types of voters and salience of elections.

All mail voting in Colorado had a positive overall turnout effect of approximately 8 percentage points—translating into an additional 900,000 ballots being cast between 2014 and 2018.

Focusing on natural experiments in Texas and Indiana, this research finds that 65-year-olds turned out at nearly the same rate as 64-year-olds, despite the fact that only 65-year-olds could vote absentee without an excuse in these states. Being just old enough to vote no-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout.

Philadelphia officials randomly sent 46,960 Philadelphia registrants postcards encouraging them to apply to vote by mail in the lead-up to the June 2020 primary election. While the intervention increased the likelihood a registrant cast a mail ballot by 0.4 percentage points —or 3%—many of these additional mail ballots counted only because a last-minute policy intervention allowed most mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to count.