Resources

This report provides guidance to election officials to communicate about the work they are doing related to voter list maintenance.

This analysis suggests that documentary proof of citizenship requirements would affect voters across the electorate. While Democrats and Republicans possess some form of documentary proof at similar rates, Republicans’ reliance on birth certificates mean they may be more heavily impacted by documentary proof requirements than Democrats. Additionally, wealthier and more highly educated voters are more likely to have documentary proof than others.

The resources below are designed to help election officials manage the process of registering voters and creating, updating, and maintaining voter records.

CEIR has surveyed states about voter registration database security every two years since 2018. These surveys have demonstrated widespread best practices in respondent states.

This report focuses on two of the most salient topics in list maintenance policy discussions today: mobility and citizenship.

CEIR interviewed and surveyed election officials in four states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Rhode Island—to create case studies about their experiences planning, developing, and implementing a new voter registration database system.

Over the last two decades, states have implemented several innovative policies that streamline the process of voter registration, promote voter list accuracy, and create more options for eligible citizens to register or update their voter registration. Such policy innovations include online voter registration, same-day voter registration, and automatic voter registration. The number of states that have implemented at least one of these three voter registration methods increased from seven states in 2000 to 46 states in 2024.

Using Michigan's voter purge database from 2014 to 2018, this analysis finds that more Democratic leaning areas, denser/more urban areas, and areas with more Black residents had higher purge rates. Notably, while these mediation effects were significant, racial composition and median income (i.e. more black and poorer communities) remained a significant factor in voter purge rates.

This paper examines an unintended consequence of automatic voter registration: effects on party registration. Examining the state of Oregon, a state with back-end AVR, the analysis documents a significant decreases in partisan voter registration rates.

CEIR has surveyed states about voter registration database security every two years since 2018. These surveys have demonstrated widespread best practices in respondent states.

Using data from Orange County, CA, this research finds that a variation of automatic voter registration that targets existing registrants as opposed to eligible nonregistrants—termed automatic reregistration (ARR)—increases turnout by 5.8 percentage points.

This Article calls attention to the development and derailment of a novel cross-governmental bureaucracy for voter registration.