The analysis found that insufficient data exist to determine whether citizens are successfully and regularly offered these voter registration opportunities.
Resources
Use our resource library to explore the latest research in the field of election science.
This brief provides a summary of the survey's major findings in five areas—cost, implementation, voter convenience, system management, and online security—and then examines ways in which these states would like to improve online voter registration.
Authors analyze of voter turnout the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, finding that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas early voting is associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself.
This study investigates the perspective of a sample of support personnel regarding the value of voting for people with an intellectual or developmental disability and the extent to which they have provided voting instruction to their clients. Study findings revealed that very few clients vote, are registered to vote, or are provided any instruction on how to vote or be informed about voting positions.
This white paper, prepared for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, outlines the barriers faced by people with disabilities when attempting to register to vote and cast their ballot. It identifies the impact of these barriers on voter turnout and registration and outlines potential strategies to make voting for accessible for voters with disabilities.
Kimball and Baybeck follow up on the work of Creek and Karnes examining the challenges of implementing HAVA requirements in rural jurisdictions. Authors find that rural jurisdictions do in fact have higher costs per voter than their urban counterparts.
This report finds that from 2008 to 2012, ERIC states: Increased their new-voter registration rates by 1.14 percentage points, compared with just 0.27 points in non-ERIC states. Experienced a 3.39-point decrease in the rate of individuals citing registration problems as their reason for not voting, compared with a 0.57-point decline in non-ERIC states. Had an increase of just 0.10 percentage points in the use of provisional ballots—which are often issued to voters with problematic registration status; in non-ERIC states, the use of these ballots grew by 0.36 points.
This paper examines how disability relates to attitudes towards politics. Authors find that people with disabilities remain less likely to vote than nondisdabled people and that people with disabilities favor a greater government role in employment and healthcare, and give lower ratings on government responsiveness and trustworthiness.
Research commissioned by the Pew Center on the States highlights the extent of the challenge of maintaining voter lists: Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state. Meanwhile, researchers estimate at least 51 million eligible U.S. citizens are unregistered, or more than 24 percent of the eligible population.
This research seeks to expand the current understanding of usability by exploring its relationship to trust in two contexts - popular consumer products that people can choose to use and voting systems that citizens must use to participate in an election. In both studies, authors found that more usable systems were the most trusted.
This March 2010 report provided a comprehensive examination of the implementation, operation, public confidence and usage of online voter registration in Arizona and Washington
This 2009 study found that voter registration in Oregon cost more than $8.8 million during the 2008 election, a cost of $4.11 per active registered voter or $7.67 per voter registration transaction (adding new or updating existing voter records).