Resources

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 paper demonstrates that layout method and path directionality significantly affect average voter travel distance within a polling place and presents ways layout can be used to design more efficient in-person voting systems.

In this PhD dissertation, Houghton develops advanced algorithmic methods to model voter arrival behavior and vote center utilization to support election resource and capacity planning. Three core contributions: (1) compares voters’ demographic characteristics across three vote center types during the 11-day voting period across multiple elections; (2) analyzes how voters choose among multiple available vote center locations by using graph-based methods to analyze network data and perform statistical community detection; and (3) uses spatial access metrics as input to a genetic algorithm to optimize location selection for vote center siting decisions.

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 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 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.

This paper examines the demographic characteristics and professional profiles of election officials in the U.S. They find that, even amidst disruptions in politics and elections, the "typical" local election official remains the same: mid-50s white females earning just under $50,000 a year. They then explore potential reasons for the heavily female makeup of the elections workforce.

In this paper, authors use simulation to study how COVID-19-era polling location consolidation strategies affected voter wait times and resource allocation in Rhode Island, with lessons for future election planning.

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 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.

In this paper, authors provide a structured, data-driven framework to help election officials make consolidation decisions by applying it in a case study using Richland County, South Carolina data. The paper names an integer programming model, the Polling Location Consolidation Problem (PLCP), that simultaneously selects polling locations, reassigns voter precincts, and allocates resources while minimizing increases in voter travel distance.