Resources

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 resources provides a step-by-step protocol for test voting system usability and accessibility functions in use, including how well the ballot presents voters with options and allows them to confirm their choices while marking and verify their ballot before casting. This resources is intended for state certification programs and election offices evaluating a new voting system.

In this paper, authors analyze access to vote by mail and other voting methods among Native voters. Authors begin by examining the historical, structural inequities in access to mail services on reservations and utilize data on precinct locations, post office locations, drop box locations, and Election Day voting sites to show how limited access to these sites and services adversely impacts Native voters when compared to both rural and urban Arizona voters.

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

State vote by mail policies have been expanded to facilitate voting by people with disabilities, but rely on voter signatures to verify an individual's identity. This report examines how signatures and signature comparison are used in elections, explores the uses and types of signatures in other contexts, and discusses alternatives being developed that could be used in elections.

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.

Accessible vote-by-mail is critical in enabling voters with disabilities to cast their ballot privately and independently. This report reviews current elections offices' practices in administering accessible vote by mail and considers their innovations and current challenges.

Grimmer and Hersh assert that contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout have negligible effects on election outcomes. They find that election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship. These effects are not the result of countermobilization from political parties.

This document provides guidance and resources for how to test voting systems against the usability and accessibility requirements in the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) 2.0. The primary audiences for this guide are the voting system test laboratory organizations who perform certification testing.

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.