Final Grant Reports

Thomas Cao, Susan Athey; Stanford University.

We assess how highlighting the electoral process's bipartisan oversight impacts voter trust and turnout based on afield experiment of 14,000 voters ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. The treatment increased voter trust by 5 percentage points but reduced turnout by 1.4 percentage points, especially among moderate Republicans. In particular, the treatment increased the proportion of those who reported full trust in the electoral outcomes but did not vote. This suggests that interventions intended to reduce partisan polarization and boost voter trust may unintentionally discourage turnout by making the moderates feel less personally necessary to vote.

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Lonna Rae Atkeson, Florida State University; Yimeng Li, Florida State University; Lisa A. Bryant, California State University, Fresno; Wendy L. Hansen, University of New Mexico; Austin Cutler, Florida State University; Carson BA Cary, Florida State University; Eli McKown-Dawson, Florida State University; Kenneth Mackie Fitchburg State University.

We developed a 2022 primary election audit and a general election data dashboard that includes images of ballots cast in Leon County as a pilot project to help identify obstacles and methods to place these types of data online for public review. We embedded these data on a website we built for this purpose. Additional pages on the website describe post-election audit processes, data produced by election officials to verify the election outcomes, interesting ballots found in the data, and information on how to use the dashboard. Obstacles we faced in presenting these types of data in an accessible format included protecting voter privacy and ballot secrecy, correcting ballot orientation, managing the quantity of the data presented, speed and performance in data presentation, developing the dashboard design, and creating a web design and useable layout. In this report, we discuss our design, the obstacles we faced, and the solutions we found.

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Paul Gronke, Reed College; Paul Manson, Portland State University.

The Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College Local Election Official (LEO) Survey Project was initiated after the 2016 election when it was clear that LEOs were taking on new and difficult roles in response to cybersecurity threats and challenges to election integrity, along with the realization that there had been almost no national surveys of LEOs since the Congressional Research Service surveys in the 2000s (Fischer & Coleman,
2011; Kimball et al., 2013), and that almost no previous surveys had inquired about LEO attitudes and opinions regarding current issues of electoral integrity and reform. The first survey in 2018 to help better understand election preparedness, and adaptation to cybersecurity challenges, and to measure compensation rates and demographics that had not been updated in a decade. LEO Surveys in 2019, 2021, and 2022 built on initial efforts,
responded to new concerns in election administration and examined trends over time. New content focused on job satisfaction, retirement and retention, and responses to the challenges of conducting an election in the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2023 survey provided EVIC an opportunity to explore resiliency in elections offices, arguably the key issue in the post-2020 period.

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M.V. (Trey) Hood III, University of Georgia; Seth McKee, Oklahoma State University.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election cycle, Republican legislators in the Georgia General Assembly passed omnibus election reform in Senate Bill (SB) 202. Since becoming law, SB 202 remains controversial among many in the state who view the measure as potentially acting to suppress voter turnout. This research project is designed to study the effects brought about through implementation of SB 202 during the 2022 general election. Research proceeded along two primary fronts: (1) a telephone survey of 2022 non-precinct voters in Georgia and (2) a survey of county election officials. Results have been disseminated to the Georgia Secretary of State, the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials (GAVREO), various academic journals, and media outlets.

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Seo-young Silvia Kim, American University/Sogang University; Bernard L. Fraga, Emory University; Daron Shaw, University of Texas at Austin.

Voter registration databases or voter files are increasingly used for election campaigns, research, and public distribution of election-related statistics. For research, they provide better estimates of who voted, free from non-response and social desirability biases that often inflate turnout estimates reported in surveys. For campaigns and civic organizations, they provide a basis for field operations and experiments. Most importantly, for election administrators, they establish who is eligible to participate in an election, record who voted in past elections, and contribute to authoritative, certifiable election reporting. With changes to election laws due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, individual-level records of who registers, who votes, and how individuals vote (absentee/mail-in, in-person early, or in-person Election Day) are under increased scrutiny. Unfortunately, voter files are often misunderstood by the public, and this misunderstanding can lead to lowered trust in elections.

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David Kimball, University of Missouri-St. Louis; Anita Manion, University of Missouri-St. Louis; Lisa A. Bryant, California State University, Fresno.

Our study investigates the implementation of vote centers in two counties starting in 2020. These cases offer two different contexts in terms of state requirements and oversight. Fresno County adopted vote centers in compliance with the California Voter Choice Act, while St. Louis County implemented vote centers without any state guidelines. We focus on three areas of inquiry: voter awareness and evaluation of vote centers; the siting of voting locations and their impact on voter turnout; and lessons learned in terms of staff, technology, and procedures needed for successful implementation. We also examine poll worker perspectives and whether state guidelines make implementation easier or more difficult for local election officials. These are important considerations given the increasing number of jurisdictions considering vote centers, in response to budget pressures and the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Thad Kousser, UC San Diego Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research; Mindy Romero, USC Center for Inclusive Democracy; Seth Hill, UC San Diego Department of Political Science.

We created a research-practice partnership with elections officials in four states – California, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas – to measure voter experiences during the 2022 midterm election cycle, test levels of trust in the accuracy and integrity of the election results, and to test the effectiveness of strategies that officials are pursuing to build trust in elections. We worked collaboratively with these officials to design ten surveys and survey experiments and wrote reports identifying effective strategies for increasing trust in elections, publicizing the results at practitioner meetings, at academic conferences, and to the broader public.

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Christopher B. Mann, Skidmore College; Kathleen Searles, Louisiana State University.

Scholars and practitioners have little knowledge of how the news media covers election administration. To study public attitudes about election
administration without understanding the information environment is akin to testing medical treatments without understanding anatomy. Our first contribution is describing the election administration information environment using large-scale datasets on local and national news coverage of election administration. The second contribution is demonstrating that journalist’s choices about framing and content in news media coverage of election administration influences attitudes about elections and democracy in a series of survey experiments.

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Thessalia Merivaki, Mississippi State University; Mara Suttmann-Lea, Connecticut College. 

In this project, we identify the dominant trust-building campaigns used by state and local election officials, with an emphasis on combating misinformation, during the 2022 election cycle. In partnership with the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI.io), we analyzed 50,000 organic posts
from over 118 state election officials’ and 1,000 local election officials’ accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter between September 10 and November 15, 2022. We produced a one-of-a-kind repository of these communications, organized using a comprehensive taxonomy of election-related
labels. This database is used to identify best trust-building communication practices, and evaluate the effectiveness of these practices on voter attitudes.

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John Carey, Dartmouth College; Brian Fogarty, University of Notre Dame; Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College; Jason Reifler, University of Exeter.

This study reports several experiments testing the effects of corrective messages debunking false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 and 2022 U.S. elections as well as a complementary experiment after the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. We find evidence that prebunking false voter fraud claims with substantive information about election security can reduce misperceptions more effectively than corrections from credible sources. Other results indicate that corrections of specific voter fraud claims fail to generate broader changes in perceptions of election integrity and that party (but not putative candidate race) is the major factor in perceptions of voter fraud at the Congressional race level.

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Jason M. Roberts, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Michael Greenberger, University of Denver.

Well trained and competent election officials are a necessary component for the smooth functioning of elections. Since 2019, 43% of Elections Director positions, the top county-level election officials, have turned over in North Carolina. Nationally, greater numbers of election directors are reporting difficulty hiring and retaining poll workers and election judges. To understand why election workers are leaving their positions, and how they might be retained, we worked with North Carolina Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell to develop a survey that aimed to uncover the reasons election workers leave their positions and the policies that might induce election workers to stay. We found that Elections Directors and full-time staff report a changed work environment post-2020. Overwhelming majorities report that workload, job stress, and threats to elections workers are up, while compensation has not kept up in many North Carolina counties. Majorities report that enhanced salary and benefits are the item that would most likely encourage them to continue working in elections.

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Mindy Romero, University of Southern California; Paul Gronke, Reed College; Anna Meier, University of Southern California; Michelle M. Shafer, Elections & Voting Information Center. 

Vote-by-Mail (VBM) ballot locator and notification systems, such as BallotTrax, are intended to inform voters of the status of their VBM ballots regarding when they are mailed, received, and either accepted or rejected. Voter advocacy groups and election officials alike have been seeking effective ways to track voters’ ballots to ensure they are successfully received and counted during local, state, and federal elections. These same actors hope that ballot tracking will help strengthen voter trust and confidence in the integrity of the ballot counting process and legitimacy of election outcomes. Ballot tracking systems offer individual voters a chance to track the path of their ballot, and correct issues such as cure challenged signatures, prior to election deadlines. The Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID) at the Sol Price School of the University of Southern California (USC) and the Elections & Voting Information Center (EVIC) at Reed College collaborated to explore ballot tracking use, local election official (LEO) communication related to ballot tracking options, how ballot tracking impacts ballot rejection, and the impact of ballot tracking on voters’ information levels and attitudes about election integrity. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this research seeks to inform efforts to combat misinformation about the integrity of voting by mail and aims to strengthen democracy in the United States.

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Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robert Stein, Rice University.

In the aftermath of the disputed 2020 presidential elections, the thousands of local officials who administer U.S. elections have rightly gotten a lot of public attention and sympathy. Yet their work in administering elections would not be possible without an even larger number of volunteer poll workers. In a federal general election, as many as one million regular Americans serve as temporary election workers. These “street-level bureaucrats” who interact most directly with voters are necessary parts of the vast election infrastructure.

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Wendy Underhill and Ben Williams, National Conference of State Legislatures. 

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) conducted statutory and legislative research on absentee/mail voting laws before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and developed a timeline and description of those changes. NCSL also performed qualitative studies of policymakers’ and election officials’ perspectives on those changes by holding three focus groups. The analysis of state laws shows no retrenchment on absentee/mail voting, and in fact mostly-mail elections were adopted in three additional states plus the District of Columbia during the study period, 2020 - 2022. The focus groups indicated that Republican lawmakers are particularly focused on election accuracy, and Democratic lawmakers are more interested in expanding absentee/mail voting. Local election officials were clear that they do not seek to be policymakers, and that they desire to work with their legislators to help them get the policy outcomes they desire.

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Katie Harbath, Lia Merivaki, Rachel Orey, Mara Suttmann-Lea, Mike Wagner.

In the midst of the ongoing threats of mis-, dis-, and malinformation to public perceptions of elections, it is essential to identify whether there are election information sources that can bolster attitudes towards the electoral process. This project addresses this need head on, identifying the most
prominent messengers the public looks to for information about elections and how their choices shape perceptions of election legitimacy.

To explore these questions, a nationwide survey conducted six weeks prior to the 2022 midterm election served as the cornerstone of this investigation. We asked a representative sample of American voters (with oversamples in Georgia, Colorado, and Wisconsin) what their top three sources of election-related information are, in addition to specific questions about respondents’ confidence that their vote—as well as votes in their community, state, and nationwide—would be counted accurately in the 2022 midterm elections.

Our findings confirm that voters view election officials as information leaders and shore up the importance of trust-building social media activity by election offices in incubating voter confidence. Moving forward, the survey provides a useful baseline for over-time assessments of the public’s
preferred sources of election information in an evolving election information ecosystem.

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Cameron Wimpy, William McLean; Arkansas State University.

Election administration in rural areas is generally understudied in election science. Our explores rural election administration by employing three distinct phases. Perhaps uniquely, we undertook a qualitative study of rural election administration among local jurisdictions in six states of the Mississippi River Delta region. By engaging election officials in this area we provide heretofore unexplored depth and context—especially in light of the pandemic —to rural election administration in this region and beyond. We also completed a coding effort of election jurisdictions in forty-six states. Finally, we conducted analyses of election administration outcomes using several measures of rurality.

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