Resources

In this paper, authors find that strict voter ID laws impose a disproportionate burden on minority voters and have significant negative effects on turnout among racial and ethnic minority groups.

In this paper, authors test whether voters can detect malicious manipulation of ballot-marking devices, finding low detection rates and showing that signage and poll worker prompts can modestly improve verification rates.

This paper compares in-person versus absentee voting, finding that voters randomly assigned to in-person voting reported significantly higher levels of voter confidence than those assigned to absentee voting.

This report / guidance examines election results communication in relation to the entry’s stated focus on election results; delays; public communication. It is relevant because trusted, timely, and nonpartisan communication is one of the main tools election officials and civic groups use to counter distrust.

Using the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, authors find that wait times have a significant negative effect on voter confidence, as do challenges with voting equipment and voter registration irregularities.

In this paper, authors argue that ballot-marking devices cannot ensure that the paper ballot accurately reflects the voter's choices because voters rarely verify the printed ballot carefully enough to detect errors or manipulation.

This tool can be used to estimate outside queue capacity needs, average voter wait times, and the number of voters who will wait too long, given social distancing constraints that limit the number of people allowed inside a polling place at one time.

This report finds that the disinformation campaign surrounding the risk of voter fraud associated with mail-in ballots follows an elite-driven, mass media model.

This report documents racial disparities in Election Day wait times, finding that voters in minority precincts face systematically longer waits than those in majority-white precincts.

This tool provides eight key questions election officials should consider when designing or reviewing a ballot. These questions focus on layout, instructions, typography, and formatting to help minimize voter errors and undervoting.

Utilizing the 2008–2016 Survey on the Performance of American Elections (SPAE), the analysis finds that wait times have a negative effect on confidence as do challenges with the voting equipment and voter registration.

In this MS thesis, Bernardo investigates how ballot-length metrics (words, questions, selections, pages, sheets, bilingual status) affect voting errors during the 2018 Rhode Island midterm election. He uses logistic regression models that control for municipal- and precinct-level demographics to analyze machine-based, human-machine interaction, and ballot-marking errors. Bernardo finds that longer ballots and urban precincts significantly increase the odds of voting errors, with implications for ballot design and jurisdiction-level oversight.