Resources

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.

Authors describe the difficulties that vote-by-mail presents for Native American voters. Specifically, “members of the 574 federally recognized tribes” face barriers to political participation to a greater degree than any other racial or ethnic group. The authors also define measures that can be taken to level the field, all while respecting social distancing.

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, Merivaki and Smith seek to examine who is more likely to cast a provisional ballot and why some provisional ballots are rejected. They suggest that beyond individual-level factors, there are administrative reasons why some prospective voters are more likely to be required to cast provisional ballots, and why some provisional ballots are rejected.

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.

Cantoni examines the effect of voting costs - specifically distance to a polling location - on ballots cast. He finds that small increases in distance to a polling location reduce ballots cast. He also finds that during non-presidential elections, these effects are three times larger in high-minority areas than in low-minority areas.

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.

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 report summarizes projections of how many people with disabilities would be eligible to vote in the November 2020 elections, using data from the Census Bureau’s 2014-2018 American Community Survey combined with Census Bureau population projections for 2020-2021. The report breaks down key demographic characteristics of eligible voters with disabilities.

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.