Resources

This paper discusses the challenges faced by voters with disabilities when attempting to vote, both in-person at polling locations and at home via mail ballot. They underscore the importance of addressing these barriers given the growing disability population and prevalence of long-term barriers to ballot access.

This paper examines how disability relates to attitudes towards politics. Authors find that people with disabilities remain less likely to vote than nondisdabled people and that people with disabilities favor a greater government role in employment and healthcare, and give lower ratings on government responsiveness and trustworthiness.

This study investigates the perspective of a sample of support personnel regarding the value of voting for people with an intellectual or developmental disability and the extent to which they have provided voting instruction to their clients. Study findings revealed that very few clients vote, are registered to vote, or are provided any instruction on how to vote or be informed about voting positions.

This white paper, prepared for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, outlines the barriers faced by people with disabilities when attempting to register to vote and cast their ballot. It identifies the impact of these barriers on voter turnout and registration and outlines potential strategies to make voting for accessible for voters with disabilities.

Kimball and Baybeck follow up on the work of Creek and Karnes examining the challenges of implementing HAVA requirements in rural jurisdictions. Authors find that rural jurisdictions do in fact have higher costs per voter than their urban counterparts.

This paper is an early quasi-experimental study of the effects of rolling out all-mail elections in Washington State. In contrast with similar ear studies conducted using Oregon data, this study finds that the Washington roll-out led to turnout increases in the range of 2-to-4 percentage points, and that the effects were focused on otherwise low-propensity voters.

This research seeks to expand the current understanding of usability by exploring its relationship to trust in two contexts - popular consumer products that people can choose to use and voting systems that citizens must use to participate in an election. In both studies, authors found that more usable systems were the most trusted.

This report highlights key trends in voter turnout among voters with disabilities in the 2010 elections. Authors find that turnout by voters with disabilities was 3 percentage points lower than voters without disabilities. Authors analyze this trend by state, age, vote method, and employment status, among others.

Creek and Karnes provide one of only a handful of analyses focusing on rural election administration. Their 2010 paper examines the challenges and costs of implementing HAVA requirements in rural jurisdictions, and whether state support can help equalize the costs of implementing these requirements in rural versus urban jurisdictions.

Extending the "lost-votes" concept developed by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, this law review article estimates the number of mail ballots "lost" in the 2008 election through problems with ballot transmission and ballot rejections.

This report highlights key trends in voter turnout among voters with disabilities in the 2008 elections. Authors find that turnout by voters with disabilities was 3 percentage points lower than voters without disabilities. Authors analyze this trends by state, age, vote method, and employment, among others.

This paper is an early experimental study of the effects of vote-by-mail elections. Using individual voter data from California, the authors find that as-if random assignment of voters to cast mail ballots reduces turnout in state elections, although they do find positive turnout effect for special local elections.