Resources

Study examining what election officials can do to counteract distrust during delays in vote-counting.

The analysis implies election workers are more likely to wrongly reject valid ballots for purported signature mismatch than to correctly reject invalidly signed returns. On the other hand, research on election workers as problem-solvers suggests they may try to minimize the wrongful rejection of ballots.

These materials were designed by The Elections Group for use by election officials to enhance transparency and public understanding of mail ballot processing. The signs and posters provided are intended for display in election offices and ballot processing areas.

This one-pager provides a brief overview of a study conducted on how tours of the Maricopa County, AZ election facility increased trust among tour participants.

This RAND resource addresses technology, misinformation, political violence, or public communication risks that could affect trust in the 2024 election environment. It is relevant because confidence depends not only on actual system security but also on whether voters understand the safeguards protecting registration, voting, and counting. For this dataset, it helps capture the most recent post-2020 trust environment and the continuing effects of election denial, security concerns, and polarization.

Using a comparative state-politics approach and new data, authors demonstrate that exposure to COVID substantially influenced voter turnout, and election policies had a major effect on whether a voter cast a ballot by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day. Unique circumstances, including the emergence of voting policies as a polarizing issue, also spawned a new partisan voting gap that is especially prominent among heavy news consumers. Compared to 2018, many more Democrats than Republicans abandoned Election Day voting in favor of mail voting.

Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections this research shows that exposure to claims of voter fraud reduces confidence in electoral integrity, though not support for democracy itself.

The findings of this research suggest that signature validation, which serves as a primary safeguard for mail voting integrity, may be systematically influenced by underlying biases.

Article explaining a study investigating how videos were used to restore voter trust in different locations across the country.

This research assesses whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased participation in the 2020 election through a large-scale voter mobilization field experiment in California. Registrants were mailed a letter that described either existing safeguards to prevent vote-by-mail fraud or the ability to track one’s ballot and ensure that it was counted. Analysis of state voter records reveals that neither message increased turnout over a simple election reminder or even no contact, even among subgroups where larger effects might be expected.

This bibliography curates research on voter trust, voter confidence, election legitimacy, misinformation, and election administration.

In the 2020 North Carolina general election, about 82 percent of the roughly 26,000 voters who submitted mail ballots eligible for a cure process ultimately cast a counted ballot. About 39 percent of these counted ballots were cured in-person, and greater access to in-person curing options increased the likelihood that a ballot was cured. Democratic and non-major party registrants cured their ballots more often than Republican registrants, particularly when they lived in a county in which the Democratic Party was running a coordinated campaign focused on curing. While election officials sometimes attempted to inform voters by phone about the need to cure, there was no clear relationship between having a phone number recorded in a registration record and the likelihood that a ballot was cured.