A review of the literature on voter verification and ballot review 

One of the major issues for voting systems is whether they provide voters with a meaningful opportunity to verify their ballot choices before casting. This verification is important for helping voters catch errors or omissions made during marking, such as skipping a contest or mis-marking a selection. It also allows voters to confirm that their ballot—whether marked by hand or printed by a ballot marking device—accurately reflects their choices, including detecting any malicious changes or software errors made by the voting system.

This literature review was conducted in preparation for research to understand how voters approach the task of marking, reviewing, verifying, and casting a ballot. We included research on voting systems and voting, as well as related issues of trust, privacy, and mental models.

This research was published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as GCR 24-052, also available on NIST’s website. This report is a companion to the research report NIST GCR 24-051 How Voters Review and Verify Ballots.

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A review of the literature on voter verification and ballot review (NIST GCR 24-052)

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Key findings

This review of the literature was done in preparation for research to understand how voters approach the task of marking, reviewing, verifying, and casting a ballot. We included not only research on voting systems and voting, but also on related issues of trust, privacy, and mental models. 

The review examined research from 2001-2020 on:

  • Voting system usability and accessibility studies
  • Error detection and verification effectiveness research
  • Mental models of voting and trust in elections
  • End-to-end cryptographic voting systems
  • Privacy and security behaviors
  • Research methodologies for studying voting

The paper includes a table that summarizes error detection studies and their results and the methodology used to test them for easy comparison.

About the research

This research was conducted by Whitney Quesenbery, Suzanne Chapman, Christopher Patten, Roberto Spreggiaro and Shanee Dawkins for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in preparation for empirical research on voter verification behaviors.

This report is a companion to the research report NIST GCR 24-051 How Voters Review and Verify Ballots.

Related resources

Visit our page on voting systems to find more resources about the usability and accessibility of voting systems.