Resources

This paper examines the efficacy of post-election edits in bolstering voter confidence and whether certain aspects of audits have greater impacts than others. Authors find that how an audit is conducted is more important than what an audit finds in influencing voter evaluations of election results.

Paper exploring how vote-by-mail ballot locator and notification systems, such as BallotTrax, can be used to improve voter trust.

This Pew Research Center brief reports public-opinion findings relevant to election confidence, information trust, partisanship, or expectations about the 2024 election cycle. It is relevant because beliefs about fraud and exposure to misleading claims are central mechanisms through which confidence in election outcomes rises or falls. For this dataset, it helps capture the most recent post-2020 trust environment and the continuing effects of election denial, security concerns, and polarization.

This research finds that Black and Native Americans have lower levels of trust in elections when compared to white Americans. Asian Americans are not statistically unlike whites in their level of trust, and the trust gap that exists for Latines is partially explainable by demographic characteristics such as education and income.

The analysis suggests that ballot drop boxes and automatic ballot notification systems are crucial for reducing the attack surface to ensure secure and reliable operations.

This working paper evaluates communication strategies—such as voter education, official messaging, corrections, or prebunking—that aim to increase confidence in elections.

This panel explores a new set of conservative principles to build trust in elections.

Overall, 1.5 percent of all primary ballots cast and 1.1 percent of general election ballots cast were rejected across elections from 2012 to 2022 in Washington. There is evidence that voters of color have higher ballot rejection rates than White voters. Self-identifying male voters have slightly higher ballot rejection rates than self-identifying female voters in both primary and general elections. Younger voters have a much higher ballot rejection rate than older voters.

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of absentee/mail voting and early in-person policies between January 2020 (pre-pandemic) and November 2022. This research highlights that most absentee/mail voting policies were not significantly affected by the pandemic. If changes were made to policies for the 2020 election, they reverted to the policy existing prior to the pandemic.

This white paper reviews literature related to trust in elections.

Academic paper examining the use of audits following elections to improve voter confidence.

After discussions with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, this project used messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections to measure the impact on trust. It found that state and local election officials can be strongly effective at increasing trust in their own state elections.