Announcing Recipients of the Practice-Oriented Research to Improve Voter Registration and List Maintenance Grants

Operational Timelines: Quantifying and Visualizing the Lifecycle of Voter List Maintenance

James Alcorn & Rebecca Green – William & Mary Law School (Election Law Program)

The Election Law Program (ELP) will use this grant to research variation in voter list maintenance legal timelines and create operational visualizations for these activities. While the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) collects quantitative data on list maintenance outcomes, little research exists on the statutory inputs driving these processes. Numerous state and federal laws set timelines for list maintenance activities by multiple actors across the country. Timelines must often be synthesized from disjointed statutes, creating compliance risks. Changes to one process can inadvertently impact other timelines unless special care is taken.

This project will use the Election Law Navigator’s data to extract and standardize these legal timelines. The resulting 'List Maintenance Timeline Visualizer' will help election officials, policymakers, and judges understand

1. commonalities in processes,

2. state-specific requirements, 

3. how statutory changes impact operational workflows. 

By converting static text into dynamic process maps, the ELP aims to improve compliance and inform evidence-based election policy.

Measures & Models for Voter List Accuracy in Orange County, California

R. Michael Alvarez – California Institute of Technology

This grant will support a research agenda which seeks to find a wide array of metrics and models that can be used to evaluate the accuracy and quality of voter registration data. The project builds off of the strong collaborative foundation that has been built between the research team at the California Institute of Technology and the election administration team at the Orange County Registrar of Voters, including Bob Page, the county registrar of voters. 

Building Authoritative Election Geography: Improving Voter Registration and List Maintenance in Idaho

Vanessa Fry – Boise State University (Idaho Policy Institute)

This project addresses a practitioner-identified challenge related to the governance, maintenance, and usability of authoritative election boundary data, and its implications for voter registration accuracy, list maintenance, and administrative burden. The proposed work is designed to generate practical findings that are directly applicable to election administration practice while also contributing to the broader scholarly literature. This work will be done in partnership with the Idaho Secretary of State’s office. 

The Litigation Landscape Concerning Voter List Maintenance: Cataloging, Summarizing, and Analyzing Legal Challenges to Voter List Maintenance Procedures to Inform Sound Policy and Administrative Practice

Steven Huefner – Ohio State University (Election Law)

This project will examine the universe of litigation concerning voter list maintenance practices to inform policy and administrative conduct. Building upon our existing infrastructure for tracking major election law cases (the Major Pending Election Law Cases database), this project will catalog, summarize, and analyze litigation involving voter list maintenance systems, specifically focusing on the expert reports and evidence developed during judicial proceedings.

By indexing legal challenges, including those involving the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and state maintenance procedures, the team will provide a fact-based analysis of the "crosswinds" currently affecting these state systems. The research aims to achieve immediate impact by equipping practitioners and policymakers with the tools and understanding to improve and defend the security and accuracy of voter rolls.

Toward A Common Framework for Voter List Maintenance

Katy Owens Hubler – National Conference of State Legislatures

The project consists of three components supporting the identification and dissemination of voter list maintenance policy considerations: a cross-state comparable classification of list maintenance practices; state snapshots of existing voter list maintenance practices; and a  virtual convening to present findings.

1. The first component of the project builds upon NCSL’s existing voter list maintenance resources by critically reviewing the text and tables in the report to develop a common taxonomy, or set of categories, for voter list maintenance processes—a critical foundation for policy analysis and innovation. This component includes creating comprehensive state snapshots detailing list maintenance practices.
2. The second component will leverage NCSL’s capacity to convene policymakers and subject matter experts to provide a venue where nonpartisan voter list maintenance research funded by the MIT Election Data + Science Lab’s program can be shared. The resulting sessions will be hosted on NCSL’s website as a resource available for future reference to legislators, legislative staff, researchers and the general public.
3. The third component consists of dissemination of the results in formats accessible to researchers (NCSL’s reports are already well-positioned to educate policymakers). In partnership with the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC), NCSL will establish a process to collect, update and report data that enables comparisons across states. This approach will ensure that stakeholders relying on NCSL have access to accurate, up-to-date, and easily navigable information and will enhance NCSL’s position as a provider of accurate and useful information on election administration.

Identifying Best Practices in List Maintenance Procedures

Chris Mann – Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR)

This research on voter list maintenance practices is intended to provide a foundation for a national conversation about greater uniformity and adoption of best practices in list maintenance across and within states. Today, it is vital to understand list maintenance procedures across states, assess impact on voter list accuracy, and improve list maintenance. The states are laboratories in which no one is tracking procedures or measuring results. The proposed research will correct this gap.

CEIR will collect list maintenance practices across all states and standardize terminology;  identify common practices, outlier practices, and correlations to other election administration policies and structures; and examine relationships with variation in voter registration rates.

Strong relationships to election officials and expertise in producing actionable research will allow CEIR to move the conversation among election officials and policymakers toward shared understanding and best practices for list maintenance.

Opting Out: The Consequences of Leaving ERIC

Anita Manion & David Kimball – University of Missouri–St. Louis

In recent years many states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), raising questions about the consequences of leaving national data-sharing compacts. This project will examine what alternative systems are being used in the absence of ERIC, what data the alternative systems provide, the cost of these systems, and what election officials’ perspectives are regarding the move away from ERIC. These questions will be examined in part through a case study on the effects of Missouri leaving ERIC, as well as through interviews with LEOs in other states that withdrew from ERIC to assess how the experience in Missouri might be similar or dissimilar to other states.

Evaluating How the USCIS SAVE System Performs in Practice: Evidence from Election Offices

Wren Orey – Bipartisan Policy Center

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system provides immigration and citizenship information to government agencies. Although election offices have largely been unable to use SAVE in the past, a series of changes made last year made the system more accessible to them. Although SAVE’s use is quickly expanding, there is limited systematic evidence on the conditions under which it produces reliable results or the downstream effects on election administration and voters.

This project will document and examine how SAVE performs when used by election offices for voter list maintenance. Working in partnership with election offices, we will examine four core questions: 

1. How accurate is SAVE?
2. What factors make SAVE more likely to return a conclusive response?
3. What policies increase the likelihood that registered voters identified as noncitizens provide documentary proof of citizenship?
4. What is the administrative burden of using SAVE?

Strategies for designing effective list maintenance notices

Whitney Quesenbery – Center for Civic Design 

Every year, election offices send out notices to people who are registered to vote, but may no longer live at the address in their voter record. This year, several states are also reaching out to voters to update data in voter records. These efforts are a critical component of list maintenance, confirming information collected from sources such as the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and the United State Postal Service (USPS) to update or make voter records inactive. However, few produce an actionable response. A new focus on citizenship has also prompted states to conduct more urgent maintenance campaigns.

This research will examine the current state of voter notice responses and strategies for enhancing their effectiveness. With a cohort of election officials, we will examine their approaches to list maintenance and resource/budget constraints. Analysis will create a clear picture of the current context by comparing response rates, notice timing, and the design format and content. The project publications will include evidence-based samples of best practices for list maintenance notices, ready for use in the field.

List Maintenance Legibility: Improving Public Understanding of Voter Registration and List Maintenance Practices

Mara Suttmann-Lea – Connecticut College; Alisa Gray – Ball State VSTOP/CEATS

Public misunderstanding of voter registration systems and list-maintenance procedures poses ongoing challenges for election administrators, increasing administrative burden and undermining public confidence in election outcomes. This project employs a practice-oriented research design to identify and address gaps in public knowledge surrounding voter registration and list maintenance. In partnership with Indiana’s Voting System Technical Oversight Program (VSTOP), and its Certificate in Election Administration, Technology, and Security (CEATS), we will field a paired national and Indiana-specific survey measuring public knowledge, misconceptions, and information needs pertaining to voter registration and list maintenance. An embedded survey experiment will test the effectiveness of alternative communication strategies commonly used by election offices. Findings will be translated into the design of evidence-based public education materials tailored specifically for administrators in Indiana. The project will produce actionable communication tools scalable beyond Indiana and a replicable scholar-practitioner partnership model to strengthen voter understanding of core election administrative practices.