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.

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.

In this paper, authors argue that risk limiting audits can verify tabulation of paper records but cannot by themselves ensure ballot marking device printouts reflect voter intent if voters do not verify them.

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.

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.

In this report, Morrell guides jurisdictions through planning and conducting risk limiting audits pilots, including stakeholder preparation, logistics, and post-pilot evaluation.

This report documents racial disparities in Election Day wait times, finding that voters in minority precincts face systematically longer waits than those in majority-white precincts.

This tool provides eight key questions election officials should consider when designing or reviewing a ballot. These questions focus on layout, instructions, typography, and formatting to help minimize voter errors and undervoting.

This system allows poll workers to hand out tickets to voters waiting in line. Tickets are printed on demand and include a QR code with a date and time for the voter to return, available in English and Spanish. When voters return, the QR code is scanned, and they proceed to vote, reducing physical wait times.