Resources

This report provides federal guidance on accessibility standards for polling places under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the primary federal framework for polling place design.

This paper surveys local election officials to examine their knowledge of Election Day lines and the steps they take to address them, finding that data collection and resource flexibility are key to reducing wait times.

This paper finds that longer ballots cause voters to become more frantic, adopt various search strategies, and spend less time researching each candidate, which raises the chances of errors and missing races.

This paper finds that the placement and configuration of voting booths, including the spacing between machines and the use of dividers, significantly increase levels of anticipated voting system usability and voter confidence.

This paper examines how precinct-level resources such as staffing, equipment, and voter arrival patterns influence voter wait times, revealing that resource allocation decisions are a key factor in long lines.

This paper finds that Hispanic voters were more likely to abstain from voting after being reassigned to a different Election Day polling place than voters in other racial groups.

This paper reviews how voting systems that are not designed to support human perceptual and cognitive limitations pose a serious threat to accurate ballot recording, and have almost certainly altered election outcomes in the United States.

This article highlights the complexity of designing and implementing poll worker training programs given the varying requirements of federal, state and local laws. Authors examine the unique practices of administrators in Williamson County, Texas, hearing first-hand and how they identify shortcomings of poll worker programs and implement improvements based on lessons learned.

Hale and Brown examine the local networks of election officials throughout the U.S. and the information exchanged between them. They demonstrate the ways in which local networks are central to innovation, key to the spread of new ideas from one locality to another, and fundamental to improving this area of public service across the country.

In this paper, authors review the evidence on voter turnout and voting difficulties among people with disabilities finding that nearly one-third of these voters who voted in a polling place in 2012 experienced difficulties in doing so. They summarize best practices for removing voting obstacles and underscore the need for such practices given the expected growth of the disability population.

This guide walks election officials through how to make election technologies such as online voter registration, polling place apps, and electronic poll books accessible to people with disabilities. It introduces the POUR principles as a framework for evaluating accessibility, recommends a layered testing approach for election systems, and points to free accessibility tools.

This paper explores the use of absentee and early voting in U.S. elections. Authors state that absentee voting is often marginally more convenient and might be less expensive to administer, but it also carries unique costs in terms of ballot insecurity, higher odds of error and fraud, and a concomitant reduction in public confidence. They assert that states intent on making the act of voting easier should prefer in-person early voting to absentee voting, while continuing to focus on improving the experience of Election Day voting.