Resources

Academic paper examining the use of audits following elections to improve voter confidence.

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.

After discussions with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, this project used messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections to measure the impact on trust. It found that state and local election officials can be strongly effective at increasing trust in their own state elections.

In this video, Thad Kousser explores the MIT Election Data + Science white paper about communicating with voters to build trust in elections.

After discussions with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, this project used messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections to measure the impact on trust. It found that state and local election officials can be strongly effective at increasing trust in their own state elections.

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 academic article studies how messages from political elites influence public confidence in elections and acceptance of democratic norms. It is relevant to the dataset because it connects election rules, information environments, or administrative performance to public confidence and perceived legitimacy. For this dataset, it adds evidence on one of the recurring drivers of election trust: experience, information, partisanship, security, or institutional performance.

This research focuses on how the timing of voter file snapshots affects the most commonly cited advantage of voter file data: accurate measures of who votes.

This research uses difference-in-differences estimates that suggest that same day voter registration disproportionately increases turnout among individuals aged 18–24 (an effect between 3.1 and 7.3 percentage points).

This research assesses whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased participation in the 2020 election through a large-scale voter mobilization field experiment. California registrants were mailed a letter that described either existing safeguards to prevent vote-by-mail fraud or the ability to track one’s ballot and ensure that it was counted. Analysis of state voter records reveals that neither message increased turnout over a simple election reminder or even no contact.

In researching how to ensure a statewide voter registration database’s accuracy and integrity, this analysis develops a Bayesian multivariate multilevel model to account for correlated patterns of change over time in multiple response variables, and label statewide anomalies using deviations from model predictions.