Resources

This report discusses ballot-accounting audits as a complementary check to tabulation audits, emphasizing reconciliation and chain of custody.

This report provides a national overview of post-election audits, audit types, history, and state practices across the United States.

This report examines election-related hurdles that hinder or prevent people with disabilities from participating fully in U.S. elections, including during the 2020 election cycle. It offers recommendations that policymakers can adopt to improve election accessibility for voters with disabilities.

In this paper, authors argue that risk limiting audits can verify tabulation of paper records but cannot by themselves ensure ballot marking device printouts reflect voter intent if voters do not verify them.

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.

This report details the design and usability testing of an accessible ranked-choice voting ballot interface built to work for voters who are blind or very low vision, have limited or no use of their hands, or have cognitive or attention disabilities. Testing with participants with various disabilities found that no single design can be fully optimized for all modes, but a workable default is achievable.

In this report, Morrell guides jurisdictions through planning and conducting risk limiting audits pilots, including stakeholder preparation, logistics, and post-pilot evaluation.

This paper examines the factors underlying low turnout rates among youth voters. Using the 2004 - 2016 Current Population Survey, authors find that restrictive environments disproportionately hurt young voters by decreasing the probability they turn out by 16 percentage points, compared with older voters.

In this paper, authors analyze the targeted adoption of early in-person voting on public colleges and university campuses. Using data from the 2018 general election in Florida, authors find uneven effects of the policy reform on overall turnout, but consistent evidence that the adoption of on-campus early voting impacts the timing and volume of voter turnout among this group.

This report highlights key trends in voter turnout among voters with disabilities in the 2020 election. Authors note a significant increase in turnout among these voters compared to the 2016 general election, reducing the turnout gap with voters without disabilities to 5.7 percentage points. However, approx. 11% of voters with disabilities reported some difficulties voting.

In this paper, authors examine whether use of vote by mail exacerbates existing inequalities in mail-in ballot rejection rates. They find that younger voters were more likely to have their vote by mail ballot rejected than older voters due to lack of timeliness or deficiencies with the return envelopes. These findings highlight potential adverse impacts of expanded vote by mail on certain groups.

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.