Election Science: Convergence Accelerator Workshop

Advancing Election Administration

The logistical challenges of election administration have grown steadily over the past two decades, exploding in response to the challenges of voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Election officials face these challenges with little experience in modern management practices, and often without access to scientifically-based best practices to manage voter lists, design and manage polling places, and manage voters’ geographic mobility. The 2020 election has shown that in an emergency, election administration and infrastructure can adapt to provide secure, safe, and accurate elections. However, a more sustained approach is needed to ensure that election administrators and voters benefit from best practices in engineering, mathematical modeling and computing, and the social sciences.

The objective of this workshop series was to help understand and build confidence in the outcomes of US elections, using the many years of scholarly study in this area as the background. The workshop series built upon prior work and extant knowledge to further explore the topic in the context of the Convergence Accelerator. The workshop discussions were centered around the theme of building confidence, where "confidence" is defined as:

1. scientific or empirical certainty that the elections were performed accurately and securely, and
2. that winners identified, in fact, received more votes than the losers, and that the election was conducted fairly.