Resources

Research finds adopting VBM increases turnout because it reduces the physical costs of voting for all voters and mitigates the information costs of voting conditional on the types of voters and salience of elections.

Using individual-level voter data from a 2020 Washington State election, the research shows that voters are more likely to use the nearest drop box to their residence relative to other drop boxes. In Washington’s 2020 August primary, 52% of drop box voters in our data used their nearest drop box.

This United States Postal Service (USPS) report outlines the scope of election mail handled by USPS and identifies key service challenges including poorly designed ballot envelopes, tight state deadlines that don't align with postal delivery windows, and inconsistent postmarking requirements. The report identifies the "extraordinary measures" taken by USPS during election periods to effectively process and deliver election mail.

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 paper examines the barriers that Native Americans face
when trying to register and participate in elections. Through conducting several field hearings, authors uncover several important findings related to polling place access and first generation voting barriers that prevent them from casting a ballot.

Authors collect data from 1996-2018 on all three U.S. states who implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. They find that: (1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party's share of turnout; (2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party's vote share; and (3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates.

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.

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.

Since the passage of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment of 2009, many technology solutions have been developed to help UOCAVA voters request, receive and return their ballots. This report examines the preliminary and current landscape of these technology solutions and identifies barriers to ensuring their sustainability. The report also identifies areas of further research related to emerging UOCAVA balloting solutions.

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.

Examining two states that have conducted a staggered rollout of mandatory vote-by-mail (Washington and Utah), this research finds that mandatory vote-by-mail slightly increases voter turnout but has no effect on election outcomes at various levels of government.

In this research, voters were randomly assigned to either an in-person or absentee voting condition. Participants assigned to the absentee condition expressed lower levels of confidence that their votes would be counted correctly than those assigned to the in-person voting condition. Voters who had to ask for assistance during the experiment also reported lower levels of confidence.