Resources

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

In this MS thesis, Fry examines the accessibility of in-person voting equipment, specifically Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) and Direct Recording Electronics (DREs), across U.S. elections from 2000 to 2024. She uses data from Verified Voting, the U.S. Census Bureau, and BMD/DRE manufacturers to analyze trends in the deployment of accessible equipment and to evaluate current systems against VVSG 2.0 Principle 7 (the right to vote privately and independently). The author finds that although accessible equipment coverage has improved substantially since HAVA, significant gaps remain in meeting current usability and accessibility standards.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.