Resources

This tool helps election officials determine the capacity of a modified polling place system under various social distancing measures and identify where process bottlenecks may have shifted in response to those changes.

This system allows poll workers to hand out tickets to voters waiting in line. Tickets are printed on demand and include a QR code with a date and time for the voter to return, available in English and Spanish. When voters return, the QR code is scanned, and they proceed to vote, reducing physical wait times.

This tool can be used to estimate outside queue capacity needs, average voter wait times, and the number of voters who will wait too long, given social distancing constraints that limit the number of people allowed inside a polling place at one time.

This resource is a curated hub of tools developed by university researchers and the civic tech community to help election officials manage in-person polling place operations, including resource allocation, queue management, capacity planning with social distancing, and poll worker management.

This article, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, discusses the overarching trend of poll worker shortages in U.S. elections. Authors identify potential strategies to address shortages, rooted in the practices of state and local election officials. While the pandemic serves as the backdrop for this article, its recommendations remain relevant to elections today.

This resource provides strategies for election officials for recruiting and retaining election workers. It features direct examples from local jurisdicitions that have had success implementing these strategies.

In this resource, Verified Voting explains why post-election audits of paper ballots provide evidence for election outcomes and opportunities to correct outcomes when needed.

Verified Voting maintains and publicly available, searchable database documenting state laws, regulations, and procedures for post-election audits across U.S. jurisdictions.

Pew commissioned a 2016 survey of almost 3,000 citizens in five Great Lakes states—Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio—as they exited MVAs after completing licensing transactions in order to determine the extent to which their experience complied with the Motor Voter law. Their findings touch on whether voters were offered the opportunity to register to vote or update their registration, how voters registered, and the mean transaction time to register.

The Voting Location and Outreach Tool is a publicly available tool that allows users to visualize data on the number, location, and historical use of Election Day vote centers and polling places, and to project equitable distributions of locations for upcoming elections.

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 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.