Resources

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, authors examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. These findings bear significant implications for mail ballot access by those of the Navajo Nation.

This brief documents the emergence and growth of mail balloting and details the unique administrative arrangements associated with this method of voting, related research and best practices, and areas where there is still more to learn. Voting by uniformed and overseas citizens—"UOCAVA” voters—is a special case not focused on in this report.

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.

In this video Paul Gronke, Director of the Elections and Voting Information Center, outlines the results of the 2023 white paper "An Overview: Vote By Mail in the United States." This paper documents the emergence and growth of mail balloting and details the unique administrative arrangements associated with this method of voting, related research and best practices, and areas where there is still more to learn.

In this paper, authors compare electronic and paper ballot voting systems, examining how election laws directly impact operational efficiency and capacity, and what this means for polling place design and resource allocation.

In this paper, authors use simulation-optimization to identify voting equipment allocation requirements across different polling location consolidation strategies, providing guidance for jurisdictions considering consolidation.

This paper uses geographic discontinuities at block boundaries to identify the causal effect of polling place assignment on voter turnout, finding that distance to and familiarity with a polling location matter for participation.

In this paper, authors examine how polling place closures following the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision affected voter wait times during Georgia's 2016 presidential election. Using queueing theory and empirical data, it quantifies the impact of consolidating polling locations on wait times, with particular attention to how closures affected different communities. Authors provide evidence linking post-Shelby polling place reductions to measurably longer lines.

The SMILE series are instructional videos, based on over 8,000 simulations, that help election officials visualize cost-effective resource allocations for polling locations that keep wait times under 30 minutes. The series covers polling place consolidation, new equipment integration, and allocation of accessible voting technology.