Resources

The 2023 State-by-State Compendium cites statutory requirements for serving as a poll worker in each state, including voter registration qualifications, age, residency, political affiliation, term requirements, compensation, and training, among others.

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of absentee/mail voting and early in-person policies between January 2020 (pre-pandemic) and November 2022. This research highlights that most absentee/mail voting policies were not significantly affected by the pandemic. If changes were made to policies for the 2020 election, they reverted to the policy existing prior to the pandemic.

In this paper, authors examine whether the main predictors of election administration opinions, particularly partisanship and jurisdiction size, are similar for LEOs and the public. They analyze results from two national surveys with identically worded questions administered to both groups, finding that these groups diverge on the topic of election integrity but share similar opinions on election security and reform proposals.

This study demonstrates that the level of accessibility of state absentee and mail voting laws as well as their administration have significant effects on voter turnout. The results also reveal that higher performing U.S. Postal Service administration can enhance the impact of absentee and mail voting laws, particularly in states with the most restrictive mail voting laws.

The 2023 Local Election Official Survey explored the views and opinions of 852 local election officials, finding that a high number of officials were administering their first-election in 2020. Election officials also expressed facing threats and harassment, growing concerns of political interference in elections, and the need for more resources to meet administration and security needs.

This brief documents the emergence and growth of mail balloting and details the unique administrative arrangements associated with this method of voting, related research and best practices, and areas where there is still more to learn. Voting by uniformed and overseas citizens—"UOCAVA” voters—is a special case not focused on in this report.

This report highlights key factors influencing poll worker recruitment and retention, including poll worker pay, implementation of partisan balance requirements, and harassment. It also offers potential strategies legislators can use to improvement address these factors and improvement poll worker recruitment and retention.

This report examines the impact of voting laws on voter turnout and choice of voting method (referred to from here on as voting method) in the 2020 election and the effects of in-person voting on the spread of COVID-19.

In this paper, authors examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. These findings bear significant implications for mail ballot access by those of the Navajo Nation.

This research studies whether characteristics such as election results, turnout, and policies in similar sized counties differ based on the political affiliation of directly elected local election officials. Authors find that regardless of political affiliation, local election officials are more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and that these officials generally do not use their positions to advantage their party.

This study aims to understand poll worker incentives and motivations. Authors analyze original data from a 2015 survey of poll workers during the 2015 British general election. They found that a range of relationships exist between individuals' decision to serve as a poll worker and various incentives, as well as poll workers' socio-economic, social capital, and satisfaction profiles.

Using a comparative state-politics approach and new data, authors demonstrate that exposure to COVID substantially influenced voter turnout, and election policies had a major effect on whether a voter cast a ballot by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day. Unique circumstances, including the emergence of voting policies as a polarizing issue, also spawned a new partisan voting gap that is especially prominent among heavy news consumers. Compared to 2018, many more Democrats than Republicans abandoned Election Day voting in favor of mail voting.