Resources

At think link, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission houses a variety of reports, best practices guides and implementation tools (e.g., quick start guides) to help election officials manage mail voting processes and serve voters who use vote-by-mail or absentee voting options.

In this paper, authors invite the human factors and ergonomics community to engage with election administration research. The paper describes the complexity and scale of U.S. election administration and identifies open research challenges where human factors expertise is directly applicable, including accessible design, poll worker training, and error minimization.

In this MS thesis, the author investigates how voting equipment type (paper ballots, optical scan, and ballot marking devices) affects voting process performance across three elections at three locations. They use observational time studies and discrete-event simulation to model how different voting systems affect voter wait times, throughput, and overall process efficiency. The author find that performance improvements from adopting newer voting technologies are inconsistent across election contexts.

This paper synthesizes best practices for in-person voting across polling place access, check-in and wait times, polling place layout and design, ballot design, and the voter experience.

This Publicly available, interactive tool helps election officials and their IT teams identify, understand, and prioritize cybersecurity solutions for their election operations.

This toolkit provides signage guidelines and ready-to-use templates designed for election offices of any size. They include directional signs, accessibility notices, and voter instruction materials for both inside and outside the polling location.

This publicly available interactive tool (currently in beta) allows election officials to map the layout and setup of voting equipment at an in-person polling location. Users can generate a custom, to-scale model of their space, incorporate key elements such as electrical outlets, doors, and windows, or select from common layout designs. Designs can be printed and shared with polling location leads to facilitate setup.

In this MS thesis, Fry examines the accessibility of in-person voting equipment, specifically Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) and Direct Recording Electronics (DREs), across U.S. elections from 2000 to 2024. She uses data from Verified Voting, the U.S. Census Bureau, and BMD/DRE manufacturers to analyze trends in the deployment of accessible equipment and to evaluate current systems against VVSG 2.0 Principle 7 (the right to vote privately and independently). The author finds that although accessible equipment coverage has improved substantially since HAVA, significant gaps remain in meeting current usability and accessibility standards.

This publicly available tool allows election offices to enter the quantities of equipment, materials, and archives they have and receive an estimate of the warehouse space required to store in-person voting materials.

In this paper, authors utilize "policyscape" and "policy drift" as lens to conceptualize stability and change in election administration. More specifically, policy drift helps to explain a disconnect between the current service expectations from these offices and existing models of staffing and workforce development. These conclusions were reached through interviews with local election officials in Oregon.

Study investigating how to counter misinformation about voting and election fraud using a comparitive study between the United States and Brazil.

This paper introduces Bayesian/low-variance risk limiting audit approaches using marginal mark recording to reduce variability and sample requirements.