Resources

Study examining what election officials can do to counteract distrust during delays in vote-counting.

This RAND resource addresses technology, misinformation, political violence, or public communication risks that could affect trust in the 2024 election environment. It is relevant because confidence depends not only on actual system security but also on whether voters understand the safeguards protecting registration, voting, and counting. For this dataset, it helps capture the most recent post-2020 trust environment and the continuing effects of election denial, security concerns, and polarization.

This one-pager provides a brief overview of a study conducted on how tours of the Maricopa County, AZ election facility increased trust among tour participants.

This paper demonstrates that layout method and path directionality significantly affect average voter travel distance within a polling place and presents ways layout can be used to design more efficient in-person voting systems.

Using a preregistered survey experiment of nearly 10,000 Americans, this article shows that informing voters about longer-than-expected vote counting time induces a large, significant decrease in trust in the election. However, viewing a “prebunking” video in advance of being informed of the delay in results more than makes up for the delay-induced decrease in election trust.

One-pager explaining the results of a study where voters were informed election results would be available after a multi-day process, and examining solutions from that study to improve voter trust in vote counting measures.

This academic article examines how unsupported fraud claims or misperceptions about voting affect confidence in election outcomes and perceived legitimacy. It is relevant to the dataset because it connects election rules, information environments, or administrative performance to public confidence and perceived legitimacy. For this dataset, it helps capture the most recent post-2020 trust environment and the continuing effects of election denial, security concerns, and polarization.

Academic paper examining how race and state policies impact voter trust and confience in electoral systems.

In this PhD dissertation, Houghton develops advanced algorithmic methods to model voter arrival behavior and vote center utilization to support election resource and capacity planning. Three core contributions: (1) compares voters’ demographic characteristics across three vote center types during the 11-day voting period across multiple elections; (2) analyzes how voters choose among multiple available vote center locations by using graph-based methods to analyze network data and perform statistical community detection; and (3) uses spatial access metrics as input to a genetic algorithm to optimize location selection for vote center siting decisions.

This research finds that Black and Native Americans have lower levels of trust in elections when compared to white Americans. Asian Americans are not statistically unlike whites in their level of trust, and the trust gap that exists for Latines is partially explainable by demographic characteristics such as education and income.

The SMILE series are instructional videos, based on over 8,000 simulations, that help election officials visualize cost-effective resource allocations for polling locations that keep wait times under 30 minutes. The series covers polling place consolidation, new equipment integration, and allocation of accessible voting technology.

This bibliography curates research on voter trust, voter confidence, election legitimacy, misinformation, and election administration.