Research
Our work is based on research with real voters and election offices from around the country.
Poll workers: The face of elections
In 2024, our team served as poll workers around the U.S. as part of an ethnographic participant observation research study.
Designing Usable Audio for Voting Systems
A practical guide for voting system designers on building and testing audio interfaces that give voters with disabilities a voting experience equivalent to any other…
Legibility of Summary-Style Printed Ballots
A NIST report on the legibility of summary ballots printed by ballot marking devices, for both sighted voters and those using OCR apps to read…
Usability and Accessibility of Electronic Pollbooks
A usability and accessibility review of electronic pollbooks — how poll workers and voters actually interact with them — published by NIST as part of…
Administering Accessible Vote by Mail Systems: Challenges and Innovations in Election Offices
A report on how election offices administer accessible vote by mail systems, examining current practices, innovations, and the administrative challenges that stand in the way…
A review of the literature on voter verification and ballot review
A literature review examining what research tells us about how voters verify their ballot choices before casting — covering voting systems, trust, privacy, and mental…
How voters review and verify ballots
A qualitative research report exploring how voters mark, review, verify, and cast ballots, conducted to update the human factors requirements in federal voting system standards…
Practical steps towards full accessibility for voters with disabilities
People with disabilities make up over 40 million eligible voters and continue to face barriers to participation at twice the rate of voters without disabilities.…
Short stories from overseas voters
In 2020, we collected stories from 17 Americans living—and voting—abroad.
What works for outreach to communities with low English proficiency and low civics literacy
In 2019, we did ethnographic research about the experience of new citizens in civic life in the US.
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