Resources

This June 2023 report outlines best practices for improving poll worker recruitment. It identifies barriers such as overly restrictive residency and age requirements, heavy reliance on political parties for hiring, and insufficient compensation and training standards. The report recommends concrete reforms to help election administrators build a more diverse and sufficient poll worker workforce.

This report highlights key factors influencing poll worker recruitment and retention, including poll worker pay, implementation of partisan balance requirements, and harassment. It also offers potential strategies legislators can use to improvement address these factors and improvement poll worker recruitment and retention.

This report summarizes existing academic literature related to election official and poll worker recruitment, training, and retention. Authors discuss the demographic characteristics of the elections workforce, methods of selection, training programs and barriers to retaining elections workers.

This research studies whether characteristics such as election results, turnout, and policies in similar sized counties differ based on the political affiliation of directly elected local election officials. Authors find that regardless of political affiliation, local election officials are more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and that these officials generally do not use their positions to advantage their party.

In this paper, authors examine whether the main predictors of election administration opinions, particularly partisanship and jurisdiction size, are similar for LEOs and the public. They analyze results from two national surveys with identically worded questions administered to both groups, finding that these groups diverge on the topic of election integrity but share similar opinions on election security and reform proposals.

Partisan actors in the United States have recently politicized trust in election administration. This paper suggests solutions for election officials to rebuild trust in democratic processes.

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

Academic paper examining the use of audits following elections to improve voter confidence.

Report summarizing ways election officials can use public information campaigns to restore voter trust in election administration.

In this paper, authors present ALPHA, a flexible risk limiting audit method that can handle sampling without replacement and stratification while learning from audited ballots.

Explains risk limiting audits (RLA) for observers, including steps, what observers should monitor, and how RLAs compare with other post-election checks.

This report describes the Carter Center's observation of the 2022 risk limiting audit conducted in Georgia.