Resources

In this report, authors analyze evidence on voting difficulties, potential solutions, and ideas for a new center - the Center on Disability and Voting - from data using surveys, focus groups, and interviews with key stakeholders.

This report explores the legibility and readability of summary ballots printed by ballot marking devices and the ability of optical character recognition (OCR) applications commonly to voice (read) summary ballots. The report identifies typographic elements that might make it easier to read a ballot visually, the feasibility of using OCR to allow blind or low vision voters to hear their ballot read accurately, and whether there is a relationship between the design elements that support both visual and OCR-assisted reading.

This report describes qualitative research conducted to gain deeper insights about how voters mark, review, verify, and cast their ballots. It is part of the work to update the human factors—accessibility, usability, and voter privacy—requirements in federal voting system standards and fill gaps in our understanding of how voters interact with ballot marking devices.

This report and the guidelines contained therein explain how a successful accessible RCV ballot works for voters with disabilities. The goal of this work was to create a universal design for a Ranked Choice Voting ballot that would work for the most voters without special settings needed.

This report summarizes projections of how many people with disabilities would be eligible to vote in the November 2024 elections, using data from the Census Bureau’s 2018-2022 American Community Survey combined with Census Bureau population projections for 2024. The report breaks down key demographic characteristics of eligible voters with disabilities.

This review of the literature was done for research to understand how voters approach the task of marking, reviewing, verifying, and casting a ballot. It includes not only research on voting systems and voting, but on related issues of trust, privacy, and mental models. This report is a companion to the research report NIST GCR 24-051 How Voters Review and Verify Ballots.

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.

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.

This document is the third part of a series of documents on the usability of electronic pollbooks and is supplementary to Part Two in the series, Usability Testing for E-pollbooks: A
Test Protocol.

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 the second part of a series of documents on the usability of electronic pollbooks. It outlines a procedure for how e-pollbooks might be evaluated, including a preliminary protocol for running a usability test. It can be used by people designing or purchasing an e-pollbook, as a usability component for a certification or approval process, or to determine aspects of the product that need special attention in training poll workers.

This document provides guidance and resources for how to test voting systems against the usability and accessibility requirements in the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) 2.0. The primary audiences for this guide are the voting system test laboratory organizations who perform certification testing.