Resources

This resource is a curated hub of tools developed by university researchers and the civic tech community to help election officials manage in-person polling place operations, including resource allocation, queue management, capacity planning with social distancing, and poll worker management.

Examining two states that have conducted a staggered rollout of mandatory vote-by-mail (Washington and Utah), this research finds that mandatory vote-by-mail slightly increases voter turnout but has no effect on election outcomes at various levels of government.

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 research, voters were randomly assigned to either an in-person or absentee voting condition. Participants assigned to the absentee condition expressed lower levels of confidence that their votes would be counted correctly than those assigned to the in-person voting condition. Voters who had to ask for assistance during the experiment also reported lower levels of confidence.

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 research finds that expanding universal vote-by-mail has not dramatically advantaged either party historically.

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.

This study of California focuses on (1) vote-by-mail signature verification processes and (2) notice and remedy procedures for unverified signatures.

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 research tests four explanations for how vote by mail voters choose to return their ballot, including the social rewards of voting, the costs of voting, trust in U.S. Postal Service and a preference to cast a ballot after campaigning ends. It finds supporting evidence for each explanation conditioned by prior history of voting.