Resources

This paper provides a history of military voting by absentee ballot.

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.

This guide takes a comprehensive look at ballot processing, tracing ballots from intake to tally and archiving, providing election officials with process descriptions, tracking forms, supply lists, and work roles. Election officials can edit this guide to match unique local/state needs and can use the guide to support staff trainings or helping observers understand what they’re watching.

This toolkit helps election officials design and produce the materials poll workers need to set up and operate a polling place or vote center, including layout diagrams, signage, and procedural materials. It covers both traditional polling places and vote center models.

This MS thesis examines how polling place layout and path directionality affect voting system performance across turnout levels. The author models a two-step voting system in a theoretical 1,000 sq ft polling place using discrete event simulation, testing multiple layout configurations and voter routing strategies. They find that perimeter layouts with unidirectional voter flow minimize average travel distance and time-in-system across turnout levels.

In this paper, Pettigrew demonstrate that for every additional hour a voter waits in line, their probability of voting in the subsequent election drops by one percentage point. He finds that negative experiences carry over to future elections disproportionately for underrepresented voters.

In this paper, authors explore how ballot length affects specific types of voting errors, including human-machine interaction errors and voter ballot-marking errors.

In this paper, authors analyze how transitioning to vote centers impacts voters' experiences, noting that inadequate implementation may result in longer waits and increased voter dissatisfaction.

This paper explores how voting experiences and fraud perceptions influence voter confidence, revealing that negative voting experiences, particularly long wait times, are linked to decreased confidence and increased perceptions of fraud.

This paper examines which voters are disenfranchised by voter ID laws, finding disproportionate impacts on Latino and Black voters who are more likely to lack required identification.

In this paper, authors find that non-white voters are more likely to lack acceptable photo identification, and that those voting without ID are disproportionately Latino and Black.

This paper examines how changes in Election Day polling place locations affect voter turnout. The authors analyze voter behavior in three presidential elections in North Carolina (2008 - 2016), finding that these changes reduce Election Day voting on average, but that the reduction is offset by substitution into early voting.