Resources

This tool helps election officials determine the capacity of a modified polling place system under various social distancing measures and identify where process bottlenecks may have shifted in response to those changes.

This paper proposes a two-part framework for evaluating ballot-marking device verification, finding that while most voters can detect errors when they check their ballot, most do not check their ballot in the first place.

Authors collect data from 1996-2018 on all three U.S. states who implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. They find that: (1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party's share of turnout; (2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party's vote share; and (3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates.

Since the passage of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment of 2009, many technology solutions have been developed to help UOCAVA voters request, receive and return their ballots. This report examines the preliminary and current landscape of these technology solutions and identifies barriers to ensuring their sustainability. The report also identifies areas of further research related to emerging UOCAVA balloting solutions.

In this paper, Cantoni Indicates that extending the distance to a polling place by a quarter mile decreases voter turnout by one to three percentage points, with a greater impact observed in areas with higher proportions of non-white voters.

In this paper, authors generate voter wait-time estimates using an indifference-zone generalized binary search method to optimize and determine resource allocation, such as electronic poll books and voting machines, to reduce wait times.

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 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 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.