Resources

This tool provides three resources to help election officials write and design poll worker manuals that make it easy for poll workers to quickly find information, even in stressful situations on Election Day. It includes best practices, templates, and a toolkit.

This toolkit provides nonpartisan operational best practices and starter templates for social media, press releases, and voter-facing communications to help election offices respond to planned or unplanned polling place closures and maintain operational continuity.

This publicly available tool helps election offices plan for in-person voting by estimating voter wait times. Voters can also use it to estimate how long they will wait in line, based on factors such as ballot questions and polling place resources.

Using an original dataset spanning all 50 states, authors also analyze the experience levels of current and incoming election officials and variations in turnover by several jurisdiction and office characteristics. The report also provides recommendations for policymakers to help mitigate turnover and promote workforce resiliency.

The 2024 Local Election Official (LEO) Survey provides insight into the challenges and successes facing election administrators, including job satisfaction, experience with threats and harassment, and hiring and funding challenges. It also highlights LEOs’ perspectives on the performance of U.S. elections and their role in voter education and engagement.

This report aims to support election officials in strengthening poll worker programs and recruitment. It outlines state legal frameworks for serving as a poll worker, including voter status and residency, age requirements, and compensation. It also highlights state, local, and political party strategies for improving poll worker recruitment, such as community partnerships, targeted outreach, and improved training programs.

This report uses data from the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) Threats and harassment Database (THD) to identify and discuss trends in threats and harassment against election officials between 2022 and 2024. BDI found that election officials faced an elevated risk of threats around election time during the period studied. BDI publishes updated analyses of the THD every month.

This report examines barriers impacting voting access among groups such as people with disabilities, young voters, Native Americans, and rural residents. It puts forth several reforms such as expanded vote by mail policies and implementation of plain language in voter materials to address these barriers. Authors also highlight current research gaps and areas where further research is necessary.

Accessible vote-by-mail is critical in enabling voters with disabilities to cast their ballot privately and independently. This report reviews current elections offices' practices in administering accessible vote by mail and considers their innovations and current challenges.

State vote by mail policies have been expanded to facilitate voting by people with disabilities, but rely on voter signatures to verify an individual's identity. This report examines how signatures and signature comparison are used in elections, explores the uses and types of signatures in other contexts, and discusses alternatives being developed that could be used in elections.

This report is intended to assist election officials in developing poll worker training to support voters with disabilities at the polling place. This work is in response to the inconsistency of available training materials for poll workers on how to set up accessible voting systems and support voters in using them.

Authors find that improving the effectiveness of voter registration through Medicaid transactions and oth-
er agencies covered by the National Voter Regis-
tration Act of 1993 could have an impact
on the number of people with disabilities who are
registered to vote or have their registration auto-
matically updated, and therefore are ready to vote.