Resources

This guide takes a comprehensive look at ballot processing, tracing ballots from intake to tally and archiving, providing election officials with process descriptions, tracking forms, supply lists, and work roles. Election officials can edit this guide to match unique local/state needs and can use the guide to support staff trainings or helping observers understand what they’re watching.

Research finds adopting VBM increases turnout because it reduces the physical costs of voting for all voters and mitigates the information costs of voting conditional on the types of voters and salience of elections.

In this paper, authors explore how ballot length affects specific types of voting errors, including human-machine interaction errors and voter ballot-marking errors.

Using individual-level voter data from a 2020 Washington State election, the research shows that voters are more likely to use the nearest drop box to their residence relative to other drop boxes. In Washington’s 2020 August primary, 52% of drop box voters in our data used their nearest drop box.

This United States Postal Service (USPS) report outlines the scope of election mail handled by USPS and identifies key service challenges including poorly designed ballot envelopes, tight state deadlines that don't align with postal delivery windows, and inconsistent postmarking requirements. The report identifies the "extraordinary measures" taken by USPS during election periods to effectively process and deliver election mail.

Even before the 2020 election, this reseach finds that voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Cooperative Election Study (CES), authors find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.

In this paper, Pettigrew demonstrate that for every additional hour a voter waits in line, their probability of voting in the subsequent election drops by one percentage point. He finds that negative experiences carry over to future elections disproportionately for underrepresented voters.

The research finds no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall. Between 2016 and 2019, RBM (VBM) states reported similar fraud rates to non-RBM (non-VBM) states. Moreover, it is estimated Washington would have reported 73 more cases of fraud between 2011 and 2019 had it not introduced its VBM law.

In this paper, authors find that non-white voters are more likely to lack acceptable photo identification, and that those voting without ID are disproportionately Latino and Black.

This paper provides a history of military voting by absentee ballot.

This MS thesis examines how polling place layout and path directionality affect voting system performance across turnout levels. The author models a two-step voting system in a theoretical 1,000 sq ft polling place using discrete event simulation, testing multiple layout configurations and voter routing strategies. They find that perimeter layouts with unidirectional voter flow minimize average travel distance and time-in-system across turnout levels.

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.