This post-election survey reports on how Americans cast ballots in 2018 and how confident they were that votes were counted accurately.
Resources
Use our resource library to explore the latest research in the field of election science.
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 finds that Black and Latino voters generally wait longer in line to vote than white voters. These instances occur with longer wait times, usually observed in neighborhoods with higher minority populations compared to predominantly white neighborhoods.
This PhD dissertation examines U.S. election administration through three empirical studies. Three core contributions: (1) documentation of racial disparities in voter wait times across polling places, showing that Black and Latino voters wait significantly longer than white voters due to differential resource allocation; (2) analysis of how the partisan and demographic composition of jurisdictions predicts administrative resource levels; and (3) estimation of the downstream turnout consequences of long waits, showing that each additional hour of waiting reduces the probability of future voting. Chapters were subsequently published in Political Science Quarterly and Electoral Studies. Advisor: Gary King.
This paper finds that voters with disabilities face significant barriers to in-person voting, including inaccessible polling places and equipment, which contribute to lower turnout rates among this group.
In this paper, authors use administrative data on incidents at polling places to show that in-person voting problems occur at low overall rates but tend to recur at the same polling places across multiple elections, suggesting that targeted intervention can be effective.
In this paper, authors identify strong negative associations between strict voter ID laws and turnout rates among racial and ethnic minority voters.
This paper finds that Hispanic voters were more likely to abstain from voting after being reassigned to a different Election Day polling place than voters in other racial groups.
This post-election survey reports on how Americans cast ballots in 2016 and how confident they were that votes were counted accurately.
This paper examines how precinct-level resources such as staffing, equipment, and voter arrival patterns influence voter wait times, revealing that resource allocation decisions are a key factor in long lines.
This paper finds that the placement and configuration of voting booths, including the spacing between machines and the use of dividers, significantly increase levels of anticipated voting system usability and voter confidence.
This paper finds that longer ballots cause voters to become more frantic, adopt various search strategies, and spend less time researching each candidate, which raises the chances of errors and missing races.