The 2022 Local Election Official Survey provides insight into the challenges and successes facing election administrators by analyzing their workloads, job satisfaction, and efforts and views related to voter education and election confidence. The survey also highlights election officials' growing workloads, feelings of preparedness for the election, and growing voter-centric attitudes.
Resources
Use our resource library to explore the latest research in the field of election science.
This report surveys temporary election-worker policies across all 50 states, highlighting both the protections in place and the gaps that remain. It includes a dataset of election worker requirements, including data points for what trainings are required, who is required to attend them, if election worker oaths are required, and what policies are in place to achieve political parity of poll workers.
This report provides practical guidance for conducting tabulation audits, with discussion of audit methods and links to risk limiting audit resources.
The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States analyzes the evolution and application of administrative election procedures at the state and local levels. It provides foundational knowledge for understanding the complexity of administering elections, specifically in regard to voter registration, and the key processes of administering elections.
This paper shows how reporting data at the ballot-card level can reduce risk limiting audits sample sizes and improve audit efficiency.
This report discusses ballot-accounting audits as a complementary check to tabulation audits, emphasizing reconciliation and chain of custody.
This paper explores whether officials in county governments follow their partisan allegiances when selecting and siting early voting locations. Authors find that the partisanship of county governments does not influence the location of early voting sites, but has modest effects on the number of early voting sites.
This report provides a national overview of post-election audits, audit types, history, and state practices across the United States.
This toolkit helps election officials design and produce the materials poll workers need to set up and operate a polling place or vote center, including layout diagrams, signage, and procedural materials. It covers both traditional polling places and vote center models.
The 2021 Local Election Official Survey explored the views and opinions of 233 local election officials. The survey finds that most election officials are motivated by desires to serve their local community, are concerned about harassment while on the job, and believe that social media is increasing political division.
The guide provides a basic framework for testing risk limiting audits in diverse contexts by outlining foundational prerequisites and operational, legal and regulatory considerations
In this paper, Jones and Stein test an expanded explanation for poll worker recruitment focused on reducing the demand for poll workers through efficiency gains. Based on the results of a national panel survey of election officials, authors find that in-person precinct voting on Election Day is a significant source of difficulty in obtaining poll workers. They offer widely available and political neutral strategies aimed at reducing poll worker scarcity.