Resources

This study investigates the perspective of a sample of support personnel regarding the value of voting for people with an intellectual or developmental disability and the extent to which they have provided voting instruction to their clients. Study findings revealed that very few clients vote, are registered to vote, or are provided any instruction on how to vote or be informed about voting positions.

Kimball and Baybeck follow up on the work of Creek and Karnes examining the challenges of implementing HAVA requirements in rural jurisdictions. Authors find that rural jurisdictions do in fact have higher costs per voter than their urban counterparts.

This report finds that from 2008 to 2012, ERIC states: Increased their new-voter registration rates by 1.14 percentage points, compared with just 0.27 points in non-ERIC states. Experienced a 3.39-point decrease in the rate of individuals citing registration problems as their reason for not voting, compared with a 0.57-point decline in non-ERIC states. Had an increase of just 0.10 percentage points in the use of provisional ballots—which are often issued to voters with problematic registration status; in non-ERIC states, the use of these ballots grew by 0.36 points.

This paper is an early quasi-experimental study of the effects of rolling out all-mail elections in Washington State. In contrast with similar ear studies conducted using Oregon data, this study finds that the Washington roll-out led to turnout increases in the range of 2-to-4 percentage points, and that the effects were focused on otherwise low-propensity voters.

This research seeks to expand the current understanding of usability by exploring its relationship to trust in two contexts - popular consumer products that people can choose to use and voting systems that citizens must use to participate in an election. In both studies, authors found that more usable systems were the most trusted.

Research commissioned by the Pew Center on the States highlights the extent of the challenge of maintaining voter lists: Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state. Meanwhile, researchers estimate at least 51 million eligible U.S. citizens are unregistered, or more than 24 percent of the eligible population.

This paper examines the relationship between individuals' public service motivation (PSM) and their work sector (public, nonprofit, or for-profit) preferences. Authors find that PSM is a moderate indicator of an individual's sector preference, notably, as PSM increases, the desire to work in the public sector also increases, relative to the for-profit sector. The findings of this paper bear potential implications for understanding the motivations of election officials and poll workers in serving the public.

This report highlights key trends in voter turnout among voters with disabilities in the 2010 elections. Authors find that turnout by voters with disabilities was 3 percentage points lower than voters without disabilities. Authors analyze this trend by state, age, vote method, and employment status, among others.

Creek and Karnes provide one of only a handful of analyses focusing on rural election administration. Their 2010 paper examines the challenges and costs of implementing HAVA requirements in rural jurisdictions, and whether state support can help equalize the costs of implementing these requirements in rural versus urban jurisdictions.

This 2009 study found that voter registration in Oregon cost more than $8.8 million during the 2008 election, a cost of $4.11 per active registered voter or $7.67 per voter registration transaction (adding new or updating existing voter records).

This March 2010 report provided a comprehensive examination of the implementation, operation, public confidence and usage of online voter registration in Arizona and Washington

Extending the "lost-votes" concept developed by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, this law review article estimates the number of mail ballots "lost" in the 2008 election through problems with ballot transmission and ballot rejections.