This explainer reviews public attitudes toward voting machines, ballot-marking devices, paper records, and related election technologies and describes how confidence depends not only on actual system security but also on whether voters understand the safeguards protecting registration, voting, and counting.
Resources
Use our resource library to explore the latest research in the field of election science.
The results of this study demonstrate that state online voter registration increases voter turnout. The difference-in-difference analysis shows that the states’ implementation of online voter registration increases the turnout of young voters by about 3 percentage points in presidential election years.
This paper, focusing on Colorado and Washington, finds that the implementation of vote by mail causes a significant decrease in voter confidence in both states. However, this decrease appears to be temporary, disappearing after only single election cycle.
This study assesses the impact of time and registration source on the rates of rejected voter registration applications by analyzing monthly county-level voter registration reports during the 2012 election cycle in Florida. It finds that there is a dynamic relationship between administrative and seasonal factors at the county level, which condition the rates of rejected voter registrations as the registration deadline approaches.
This report examines the tools state and local election officials use to maintain voter registration lists, which include Postal Service change of address forms and death records. Authors also review the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and address election fraud in 2001–2017. During this time, the DOJ's Voting Section investigated 99 alleged violations of the Act and filed 14 cases.
This research focuses on whether voters’ confidence is shaped by the racial or ethnic representation of poll workers and election staff.
Pew commissioned a 2016 survey of almost 3,000 citizens in five Great Lakes states—Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio—as they exited MVAs after completing licensing transactions in order to determine the extent to which their experience complied with the Motor Voter law. Their findings touch on whether voters were offered the opportunity to register to vote or update their registration, how voters registered, and the mean transaction time to register.
This post-election survey reports on how Americans cast ballots in 2018 and how confident they were that votes were counted accurately.
This paper examines whether correcting information can overcome misperceptions about election fraud. It finds that providing counter information is generally ineffective at remedying misperceptions and can, depending on the source, increase endorsements of misperceptions among Republicans.
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 paper finds that media coverage of voter fraud is associated with public beliefs about voter fraud. In states where fraud was more frequently featured in local media outlets, public concerns about voter fraud were heightened. In particular, the paper finds that press attention to voter fraud has a larger influence on Republicans than Democrats and Independents.
This paper finds that the "winner" effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. It also shows the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue.