Resources

The resources below are designed to help election officials manage the process of registering voters and creating, updating, and maintaining voter records.

Using Michigan's voter purge database from 2014 to 2018, this analysis finds that more Democratic leaning areas, denser/more urban areas, and areas with more Black residents had higher purge rates. Notably, while these mediation effects were significant, racial composition and median income (i.e. more black and poorer communities) remained a significant factor in voter purge rates.

This Article calls attention to the development and derailment of a novel cross-governmental bureaucracy for voter registration.

Grimmer and Hersh assert that contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout have negligible effects on election outcomes. They find that election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship. These effects are not the result of countermobilization from political parties.

This paper examines an unintended consequence of automatic voter registration: effects on party registration. Examining the state of Oregon, a state with back-end AVR, the analysis documents a significant decreases in partisan voter registration rates.

Using data from Orange County, CA, this research finds that a variation of automatic voter registration that targets existing registrants as opposed to eligible nonregistrants—termed automatic reregistration (ARR)—increases turnout by 5.8 percentage points.

In this paper, authors analyze access to vote by mail and other voting methods among Native voters. Authors begin by examining the historical, structural inequities in access to mail services on reservations and utilize data on precinct locations, post office locations, drop box locations, and Election Day voting sites to show how limited access to these sites and services adversely impacts Native voters when compared to both rural and urban Arizona voters.

In researching how to ensure a statewide voter registration database’s accuracy and integrity, this analysis develops a Bayesian multivariate multilevel model to account for correlated patterns of change over time in multiple response variables, and label statewide anomalies using deviations from model predictions.

Using monthly data from the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles from 2017 to 2021, the research studies a series of reforms to the voter registration process conducted by the DMV between 2018 and 2020. Prior to the reforms, a large majority of unregistered DMV patrons declined the opportunity to register when conducting a transaction. When voter registration became the clear default option for certain unregistered Colorado DMV patrons in 2020, very few of them subsequently opted out, which resulted in a sudden, large increase in the rate at which DMV patrons registered to vote.

In this paper, authors examine the impact of same day registration (SDR) policies on younger voters. They find that SDR disproportionately increases turnout among individuals aged 18–24 and is especially pronounced in presidential elections. The effects of early voting and other reforms are smaller and do not consistently vary by age.

Authors use official statewide voter file and mail-in ballot data from the 2018 midterm election in Georgia to test whether certain voters are more likely to cast a mail ballot that does not count. In their analysis, authors distinguish between ballots rejected for lateness and those rejected for a mistake on the return envelope, finding that newly registered, young, and minority voters have higher rejection rates compared with their counterparts.

The results in this article suggest that while convenience measures are designed to improve registration and voting rates, they may not result in across-the-board increases that some policymakers and advocates hope for. Nevertheless, there may be some differential impacts of these innovations on registration and turnout, particularly for youth and minority voters.