Resources

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.

In this MS thesis, Houghton develops a methodology to estimate voter arrival rates at polling stations using electronic poll book transaction logs. It includes service time observations collected through time studies during the 2018 Rhode Island midterm election across seven precincts. The study applies a Hidden Markov Model to infer voter arrival patterns from the check-in records. Finds that e-pollbook logs offer a scalable, less labor-intensive alternative to manual observation for estimating arrival rates.

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 paper analyzes how vote centers influence voter turnout in various election types in Texas, showing that their effect depends on the election context and voter demographics.

This paper finds that large numbers of voters do not perceive their ballots as secret and harbor doubts about the institution's ability to keep them private, with perceptions varying by voting method and polling place design.

This report provides practical recommendations for reducing polling place wait times by improving line measurement and the management of polling place resources.

This post-election survey reports on how Americans cast ballots in 2018 and how confident they were that votes were counted accurately.

The Voting Location and Outreach Tool is a publicly available tool that allows users to visualize data on the number, location, and historical use of Election Day vote centers and polling places, and to project equitable distributions of locations for upcoming elections.

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.

This report surveys the public's views on election administration and reform, examining what voters value most in the voting experience and which changes they believe would improve it.

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.

In this paper, authors develop models to estimate voter service times from voting machine log data, providing election officials with a scalable approach to analyze and improve polling place operations.