The survey is from past Books & Ballots speakers at the Engineering for Democracy Institute at the University of Rhode Island, led by Professor Gretchen Macht. All survey responses are anonymous. The survey is part of a project to identify simple and effective ways to make election administration safer and healthier. The EDI team presented an earlier part of this research on safely working around noisy mail ballot processing machines in a Books & Ballots session last year:

You may also remember the practical and helpful tools developed by EDI’s team of engineering researchers specifically for election administrators. A Books & Ballots session (link below) earlier this year highlighted practical applications including VoteTime.app to estimate voter wait times, VBMTime.app to project vote-by-mail processing workloads, BallotStorage.app to calculate warehouse space and storage costs, and VoteLayout.app to design polling place layouts.

Remember to register for this month’s Books & Ballots on Wednesday, May 20 at 2 p.m. ET for a practical discussion about the people side of election administration:

Join us Wednesday, May 20 at 2 p.m. ET for a practical discussion about the people side of election administration and the questions every office is wrestling with right now.

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This Books and Ballots conversation brings together academics and practitioners from the University of Maryland’s Election Resilience Lab, where researchers and election officials are working side by side to better understand the HR of democracy. We’ll talk about recruitment, retention, training, and succession planning in election offices, and what makes each of these uniquely difficult in this field. How do you build a workforce pipeline when the work is cyclical, the pay is often modest, and the scrutiny has never been higher? What workforce development practices translate from other fields, and which don’t? And how can research and practice inform each other in ways that make both stronger?

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

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This edition of Elections à la Carte will focus on strategies for creating new sources of revenue from the local, state, and federal levels. The panel will include:

• Mary Hall: The auditor for Thurston County, Washington – who will share information about a ballot real estate model under which local, state, and federal governments provide funding for election costs based on the ballot races at each government level,

• Joseph Anthony: An assistant professor of political science at the State University of New York, Cortland – who proposes designating local election jurisdictions as special districts with the ability to receive a defined share of local revenue or to levy taxes themselves, and

• Lana Goitia-Paz: Senior Georgia campaign manager with All Voting is Local and a student in Auburn University’s master of public administration program – who advocates for states to create an endowment fund for elections as a source of sustainable funding.

The panel will offer a brief explanation of their ideas, which will be followed by an in-depth discussion of revenue creation for election administration. Before the webinar, attendees are encouraged to submit questions they would like the panel to discuss to Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu. The panel will try to address as many questions as time permits.

If you would like to read the panelists’ full proposals before the event, you can use the following links:

• Mary Hall: https://auburn.box.com/s/7xs33qcr69n0coxseg5jv0ac5149xwbf

• Joseph Anthony: https://auburn.box.com/s/vflp2d4rz9he5qjll3r96kudsy3765r5

• Lana Goitia-Paz: https://auburn.box.com/s/c2zb6jgs3l961h2y79buo75f7a326pov

For questions or for further information, contact Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu.

The 10th Annual ESRA Conference runs Monday, June 1 through Thursday, June 4, 2026, hosted by Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory (MODL) at the Beus Center for Law and Society in downtown Phoenix. Whether you’re a county clerk, a state-level administrator, an academic, or someone else whose work touches election administration, ESRA is built around the questions you’re already wrestling with and the evidence that can help answer them.

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What’s on the Program

This year’s program brings together cutting-edge research and frontline practice across the issues shaping elections right now: administration and management, voter registration and turnout, election technology and security, law and policy, accessibility and inclusion, poll worker recruitment and retention, elections communications and public confidence, and rigorous evaluation of the policies, programs, and innovations changing the field.

Past ESRA conferences have drawn senior academics and junior scholars, election officials at every level, poll workers, nonprofit leaders, computer scientists, and technologists. The collaborative atmosphere is the point — it’s a meeting of the minds you won’t find anywhere else.

Register and Stay in the Loop

A notional agenda and travel information for the 2026 conference are now available, with detailed program information going out to registered attendees in the coming weeks.

In this Q&A, we discuss his path from studying elections and voting in Africa to working on rural field research in the United States to becoming the first research director at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, what he’s learned from listening to rural election administrators, why some officials may be skeptical when researchers show up, and the communication and staffing challenges facing some of the country’s smallest and most remote jurisdictions.

This conversation is part of the ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles — research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

How did you end up studying election administration as a political scientist? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

It was definitely not something I set out to do. I started out studying elections and voting in Africa. Most of my doctoral work and dissertation focused on that, and I spent a lot of time doing fieldwork in African countries — monitoring elections, observing, and talking with people about their voting experiences and about life in new democracies.

After graduate school, I moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for a consulting firm, Fors Marsh. Initially, I was doing survey methodology and data science work, but I pretty quickly got moved into a large project for the Food and Drug Administration that involved fieldwork across rural America. At that same company, I also ended up working on election administration projects with the Federal Voting Assistance Program through the Department of Defense. That was really the first time I became interested in American elections. I had never set out to study them.

Later, when Charles Stewart started the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, I took a job there as the first research director. That solidified my interest in election administration. So it was not a planned path. I was never especially interested in American elections at the beginning. But through that series of experiences — fieldwork, rural research, federal voting projects, and then MIT — I became very interested in the work.

There seem to be some loose connections between your earlier work in Africa, your rural fieldwork in the United States, and your current work on election administration. Is there a through line?

Yes, there is. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. My family farms rice and soybeans, and I grew up in a very rural, small-town environment. So I have a rural experience in my own life, and I fully appreciate the rural lived experience. When I was doing fieldwork in Africa, a lot of that work also took place in rural areas. There are obviously cities in African countries, but a large percentage of the population lives in very rural places.

When I later worked on the FDA project in rural America, someone at the company knew I had that fieldwork experience and thought there might not be that much difference between managing a large rural field project in Africa and managing one in rural America. And in many ways, that was true. You deal with internet connectivity issues. If you are doing surveys and need to load data in real time, you need hotspots, cell service, tablets, software, and backup plans. You have to think carefully about how you coordinate people who are going out into the field. Safety and logistics matter in ways that they often do not when you are working in an urban center and asking people to come to a research location.

That work also got me interested in how we measure rural America. I found that people’s perceptions of what “rural” means vary a lot. Many people I worked with had grown up on the East Coast or West Coast, and their idea of rural America was often quite different from the reality. It was not necessarily negative, but it often missed important parts of the lived experience. When I moved into election administration, I started asking similar questions: How do these things vary across the election system? Most of our elections are administered at the local level — counties, municipalities, jurisdictions — and those places are very different from one another. Implementing public policy in a very urban place is different from implementing it in a very rural one. That is where those threads came together for me: rural life, fieldwork, measurement, public administration, and election administration.

What has your experience been like learning from rural election administrators?

One of the first things I learned is that many rural election administrators are not especially plugged into the conversations that people like you and I are used to having. A co-author of mine, William McLean, and I recently published an article in the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice based on interviews we conducted with rural election administrators in the lower Mississippi Delta region. We talked with officials across six states. We chose that area partly because we are local to it, but also because it receives relatively little attention — not only in election administration, but more broadly.

What we found was interesting. Many of the officials we spoke with were not aware that people were studying their work or even interested in it. But once they realized that researchers were interested, they were often excited. There was a sense of, “We didn’t know anyone cared about what we do.” At the same time, they are not always talking with their urban counterparts. They may talk to neighboring jurisdictions, people at state association meetings, or people in their state offices. But there is often an assumption that things are so different in urban areas that there is not much to compare.

And maybe they are very different. We need to study that more. But at least from the rural administrators’ perspective, urban jurisdictions have more staff and infrastructure, while rural jurisdictions have fewer resources but may know many of their voters personally. So there is excitement about the possibility of collaboration and learning from others, but it does not seem like there is as much of that happening as there could be.

Were there examples of rural election officials who were hesitant or skeptical about researchers coming in?

Yes, there were. And I want to be clear that this is not unique to election administration. I saw similar dynamics in the FDA project. People in rural areas are sometimes worried about what outsiders think of them. They may assume, sometimes incorrectly, that people who are more educated, wealthier, or from urban areas look down on them.

That dynamic can be present when researchers enter the picture. If you call someone in Arkansas and say you are from an Arkansas university, that probably gives you a better inroad than saying you worked with the Election Assistance Commission or used to work at MIT. Those credentials may sound impressive, but they can also be intimidating. People may worry that you are looking for something they are doing wrong or that your goal is to expose some failure.

That is usually not the intent. But from their perspective, they are managing the best they can with limited resources, trying to do the job in front of them. Having an outside researcher come in can feel like one more complication. In some places, there was a little standoffishness that took time to work through. In other cases, I am not sure we ever fully worked through it.

I grew up in places that I think of as rural-adjacent but also suburban-adjacent. There were plenty of cows around, and my mom owns a farm, but I could still get to a Starbucks in 15 minutes. That probably says something about how slippery the word “rural” can be. When you talk about rural election administration, what do you actually mean?

There are different ways to measure rural. If we are talking about election administration, I think administrative measures are probably the most useful. Those often operate at the county level. There are several federal measures that look at things like population, adjacency to a metropolitan area, and remoteness.

There are also more granular measures, and there are identity-based measures. If we are talking about rural voters, vote choice, or political identity, then rural identity may matter a lot. Someone might identify as rural because they run cattle or live outside a city, but if they can get to Starbucks or a mall in 15 minutes, their lived experience is different from someone who is an hour or more from those kinds of services.

For election administration, we were mostly looking at very small, remote counties. In many cases, the entire county had fewer than 20,000 people. In some places, especially in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, we were looking at counties with only a few thousand people. That is quite different from a county of 130,000 people that has a city of 80,000 people with most modern amenities. Even if parts of that county feel rural, the ability to drive 10 or 15 minutes to a larger place is very different from being an hour or more away.

What are the election administration questions you think are most urgent and understudied right now?

One major issue is list maintenance. That is not my main area of expertise, and I know a lot of people are working on it, but I think it is incredibly important. It varies widely from state to state, and it connects to so many current conversations about citizenship, immigration status, voter fraud, and voter eligibility. Many of those issues are relatively minor in actual scale, but they play a large role in our politics. That can filter down and affect election administration.

For example, fear and misunderstanding could lead a state to consider major operational changes, such as requiring all hand-counted paper ballots. That would create enormous challenges for election officials, especially in places that are already understaffed and under-resourced. More broadly, I think there is a real lack of understanding among the public about how list maintenance works, how voter rolls are maintained, who is eligible to vote, and what safeguards already exist.

Within the rural election administration work I study more closely, two issues come up again and again. The first is communication. Many rural election officials worry that they cannot effectively communicate with their voters. They worry that voters do not have good information, and they are not sure how to get good information to them. They are concerned about turnout, changes in polling place locations, and how those changes affect voters. The second is staffing. In the most remote and least-resourced places, election officials are often trying to run elections with a skeleton crew. Retired people who have served as poll workers for years may no longer be able to do it. People are leaving these communities. In some cases, jurisdictions may struggle to meet state mandates or legal requirements for staffing.

That is concerning. Elections are still happening, and people are doing the best they can. But the experience for both voters and election officials may not be what it should be — and may not be what the law intends.

The two big rural challenges you name — communication and staffing — both feel easy to identify and very hard to solve. Are there promising solutions, or is the first step just understanding the problem better?

No, and that is part of what makes them so difficult. When I talk about communication challenges, people often ask how to fix them. I do not know that I have the expertise to solve that. What I am trying to do is better understand the problem.

For example, I am working on a study that uses a large database of newspaper closures over time and looks at possible effects on turnout, voter confidence, and related outcomes. That is a way to test, empirically, something rural election officials keep telling me: that losing local information infrastructure matters.

But rolling out a major communications platform that reaches everyone across states and jurisdictions is not easy. Staffing is not easy either. You cannot simply move people into these places and tell them to do what is essentially volunteer election work. If current trends continue, these problems are likely to get worse. The first step is understanding what the trends really are and what we can say with confidence, as opposed to what we hear anecdotally when we are out talking with people. The longer-term challenge is getting the right people together to think seriously about how to address them.

Last question: If you weren’t studying elections, what would you be doing?

If I were still a political scientist, I would probably be working primarily on political methodology — how we estimate models of politics, what tools are available to us, how we can improve them, and how we can make interpretation better.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make those tools more accessible to researchers. There is often a disconnect between theoretical ideas and what people can actually put into practice. Whether I would still be doing work in Africa is a different question. That kind of work becomes harder when you get married, have a family, and end up in a job that requires you to be in one place every day.

But if I were not a political scientist at all, I think I would almost certainly be doing something related to agriculture.

Around the world, election officials in other countries face cyber-related threats every day. Just like state and local election offices in the U.S., these officials must navigate varying resources, changing threat environments, and different local contexts to identify solutions that work best for them. Their experiences can provide insights and lessons for American election officials approaching the current operational environment.

Join us at 2 p.m. ET on April 29 for a conversation with international election experts about global lessons for navigating an uncertain cybersecurity threat environment.

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Dr. Tarun Chaudhary and Nicole Leaver from the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) will share insights from their ongoing research and partnerships with election officials around the world. IFES experts draw on industry standards to develop practical frameworks for election cybersecurity in different contexts across the globe. Professor Holly Ann Garnett (Royal Military College of Canada) is co-director of the Election Integrity Project, a global network of academics and practitioners that engages in empirical research on issues related to election quality around the world. Her research focuses on how election integrity can be strengthened throughout the electoral cycle, including the role of cybersecurity.

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – and now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

In this Q&A, we discuss her path from criminal justice research to the Brennan Center for Justice to studying how voters experience the act of casting a ballot, what it actually looks like to make academic work useful to election officials, a cautionary tale about public records requests, and the leadership development project she’s currently wrapping up.

This conversation is the second in an ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles – research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

How did you end up studying election administration as a political scientist? Was there a moment or experience that pointed you in that direction?

It was not a straight line. When I was in grad school getting my master’s degree at Kent State, I thought I wanted to be a juvenile probation officer. One of the deans encouraged me to get a PhD instead, and I was happy to prolong my adolescence, so I said yes to more school.

I was assigned to work with Caroline Tolbert, who is now at the University of Iowa, and she was doing a lot of work around voter turnout and how state policy structures participation. My background was in justice studies, so I became interested in the rules around people with felony convictions and their voting rights. Working with her was the opportunity to bridge the two. That’s when I was first introduced to the idea that formal institutions – rules – shape what participation actually looks like.

When I finished my PhD, my first job was as a voting rights researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice. If you remember the 2012 election, that was when people were waiting for hours in jurisdictions across the country, and Barack Obama made those remarks about something we have to fix. That’s when my focus shifted. I moved away from state-level legislative structures and policies toward the people in local jurisdictions who are actually on the ground facilitating what voters experience when they go to cast a ballot. And from there, toward how those individual experiences shape how people perceive the system and have confidence in it.

A lot of what you do seems oriented toward making research useful to practitioners. What have you found actually works when it comes to making academic work digestible and useful for election officials?

Part of it is just acknowledging, as an academic operating in a publish-or-perish environment, that not every research project is destined to be a peer-reviewed piece of scholarship. There’s still professional value in writing something that reads like a blog post. I know at one point the Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration conference asked presenters to write a more accessible summary of what they found and why it mattered, alongside the traditional academic presentation. Things like that matter.

There’s also working with organizations like the Bipartisan Policy Center, NCSL, and the Election Assistance Commission, which create opportunities to present on issues you care about without necessarily framing it around a research question and statistical analysis – just talking about what the scholarship says or what you’ve observed.

One of the best experiences I had was working with the YMCA of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis elections office, and CIRCLE at Tufts on a project involving student election judges. Together, we developed reports from the perspective of young people speaking to election officials, the media, and school administrators about how youth can get civically involved and what that experience is like from their point of view. That project was driven by the students themselves and the work they were already doing in the elections office. As academics, we can take a backseat, lend the methodological skills we learned in graduate school, and let other people lead the show. You do not need to put the p-value in the paragraph. If people care about that, it can go in an appendix. What matters is communicating what you learned through infographics and other tools that are actually accessible to the general public.

Academic publishing moves slowly. At the same time, election administration has moved considerably faster over the last decade. How do you reconcile those two worlds?

I’d echo what I think most people would say – that even when individual topics are moving quickly, the underlying fundamentals often aren’t. There’s something durable there even when the surface feels chaotic.

But I’d also add that there are more ways to share work now than there were before. Blog posts, practitioner-focused conferences, presentations in progress – you can get ideas in front of people before they’ve gone through the full peer review cycle.

And there’s just no substitute for actually being in relationship with the people who do the work you study. They can save you from yourself. I’ve had conversations where something that feels enormously significant to me or to the general public turns out to be a fairly minor adjustment to an office’s processes. And then there are things that look simple from the outside where someone explains the downstream effects and suddenly that’s where the whole story is. You can’t really get that from reading statutes or following the news. There’s a lot to be said for physically leaving campus, walking into an elections office, and being willing to sit there, listen, and be quiet.

Have you ever run into election officials who were skeptical of researchers? How did you handle it?

Yes, and I have a perfect example of what not to do.

Early in my time at Auburn, I became interested in provisional ballots and decided – and this is genuinely embarrassing in retrospect – to send public records requests to every election office in a state I will not name. This was before 2020, so it wasn’t even during a period of heightened public skepticism of researchers. People just didn’t know what I was asking for, some thought I was up to no good, and everyone was confused about why I wanted the information I was requesting. It did not go well.

Later, I was at an election administrator-focused conference and described what I’d been trying to do. The practitioners I talked with were very frank with me – not telling me not to pursue it, but walking me through how data enters their offices, how they code things, what the forms actually mean to the people filling them out. That was enough. I effectively abandoned the project.

I’m not a medical doctor, but I think academics whose work can end up in court cases or who serve as expert witnesses have a responsibility to do no harm. Precision matters. Words mean things. The results we publish have consequences. Even if you can get software to produce results from a dataset, that doesn’t mean those results actually communicate what you think they’re communicating. That experience was foundational for me in terms of leaning on my professional network before I go too far down a path that might cause harm.

Is there a project you’ve been especially proud of?

The one I’m currently wrapping up is the Leadership and Election Administration project. We used a cohort model – essentially creating a community of practice – to investigate the relationship between professional development, career trajectory, and retention in the field.

The important thing about it is that it wasn’t a training program. It wasn’t about bringing election officials together to tell them how to do their jobs. It was about helping them think about themselves as professionals with a wide variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities who engage in leadership activities even when those activities aren’t formally part of their job description.

We had two in-person meetings – one at the beginning and one at the end – with network exercises and panels. One panel was on leadership from any seat: even if you’re not the director of your jurisdiction, what does leadership look like for you? How do you elevate your expertise as a subject matter leader? We also held remote sessions where people from different parts of the ecosystem – nonprofits, consultancies, EAC staff, vendors – just talked about what the profession looks like beyond being a local election official. We had an international elections panel. The idea was to expose people to other opportunities, whether they want to move formally up, move from local to state, or just expand their knowledge and skills by considering things like international observation.

I’m presenting the first results at the April Election Center meeting.

What’s the question in election administration you think is most urgent and most understudied right now?

I think it connects directly to what the leadership project was trying to get at. We know from scholarship in other fields that it’s the softer connections – community, belonging, feeling part of something – that really matter for longevity, especially when the environment is difficult. But in election administration, a lot of the energy around supporting the workforce is focused on resources and job skills: here’s what you need, here’s how to do it better.

What I think we need to understand better is what it means to make professionals in this space feel genuinely connected to a community beyond their immediate office. Not just equipped to do their jobs, but supported in being part of a field. That’s not exactly understudied, but I don’t think we’ve taken it seriously enough as a retention and resilience issue. The people doing this work need both the resources and the community. One without the other isn’t enough.

If you weren’t studying elections, what would you be doing?

Honestly, I have no idea. I wanted to be a juvenile probation officer, so maybe that – though it feels unlikely at this point. I’m a child of social workers, so maybe I’d be a social worker.

I’ve very much been on a non-planned plan for most of my life, and I’m not sure what my present would look like without those pivotal encounters along the way that led me here. I don’t know that I’d have it any other way.

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This conversation explored the unique challenges of rural election administration and the research behind it.

Joining the discussion:

• Dr. Cameron Wimpy, Director of the Institute for Rural Initiatives (IRI) at Arkansas State University

• Jennifer Clack, Election Coordinator, Craighead County, Arkansas

• Sydney Romine, Election Director, Surry County, North Carolina

IRI was recently awarded a grant to explore how election administration practices vary across the urban-rural spectrum. Dr. Wimpy recently hosted the Rural Election Administration Symposium to map out some of the challenges and opportunities that distinguish rural election administration. The discussion took a deeper look at this research effort and heard some of Dr. Wimpy's initial findings as well as the firsthand experience of election practitioners.

Books & Ballots is a webinar series – now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

Note: TJ Pyche is now with Ready for Tuesday.

There are more than 10,000 election jurisdictions in the United States. The majority of these are small townships or counties generally located in rural areas of our country. And while election administrators adhere to the same laws and regulations, rural election officials face different challenges than those faced in the large, urban jurisdictions.

Join us on March 26 at 1 p.m. for a conversation exploring the unique challenges of rural election administration and the research behind it.

Dr. Cameron Wimpy is the director of the Institute for Rural Initiatives (IRI) at Arkansas State University. IRI was recently awarded a grant to explore how election administration practices vary across the urban-rural spectrum. He recently hosted the Rural Election Administration Symposium to map out some of the challenges and opportunities that distinguish rural election administration.

The discussion will take a deeper look at this research effort and hear some of Dr. Wimpy’s initial findings as well as the firsthand experience of election practitioners Jennifer Clack of Craighead County, Arkansas, a symposium participant, and Sydney Romine of Surry County, North Carolina, who has attended a number of Election Science, Reform, and Administration (ESRA) conferences to learn about the intersection of elections administration and academic research.

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Books & Ballots is a webinar series – now found on Substack and as a podcast on Spotify – hosted in partnership with Ready for Tuesday, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

In this Q&A, we discuss his path from local journalism to election administration scholarship, what “practice” really means in the journal’s title, what makes a practitioner submission compelling, and why academic work is deeply relevant in a fast-moving professional environment. We also cover his alternate career plans involving Wheel of Fortune.

This conversation is the first in an ongoing Books & Ballots Q&A series highlighting the people shaping election administration from different angles – research, practice, policy, and everything in between.

The Journal of Election Administration, Research, and Practice is now fully open access. Anyone can read it online without creating an account or providing an email address.

The journal is available on the Election Center’s website, and all articles are free to read and share.

How did you get into election administration research? What was your path?

Like a lot of people, I didn’t start out thinking I would work in elections.

I came to Auburn for my undergraduate degree in journalism and worked in news for a while, mostly at small-town newspapers at the local level. I entered the industry right when the bottom was really falling out in the mid-2000s.

I eventually went back to school and earned an MPA from Jacksonville State University in Alabama. After that, I returned to Auburn to begin a Ph.D. program. While there, I connected with faculty members involved in election administration research, especially given Auburn’s relationship with the Election Center and the broader body of research in that area.

That experience really opened my eyes. Like many people, when I thought about elections before that, I thought primarily about the political side – campaigns and running races. I hadn’t fully appreciated the government and administrative side of elections: the many different ways they’re run, how systems operate, and the wide variation across jurisdictions.

Learning about those differences and the operational complexity of running elections captured my imagination. I ended up working closely with faculty studying election administration and ultimately wrote my dissertation in that area.

You’re the managing editor of the Journal of Election Administration, Research and Practice. As you work to grow the journal, what gap was it created to address? What’s its broader purpose?

A lot of it goes back to what we talked about earlier.

We accept articles from both the academic side and from practitioners and policy professionals. The goal is to bring those groups together. That idea isn’t unique to elections, but you often hear that academics who study a field aren’t always connected to the day-to-day realities of the people actually doing the work.

Mitchell Brown, Kathleen Hale, and the group that founded the journal wanted to help bridge that gap. I came on a bit later, but the vision was to create a space where practitioners could publish about their everyday experiences, operational challenges, and policy questions, alongside academic research.

One of the features I really like is that we invite practitioners to respond to academic papers. They can offer feedback such as, “This aligns with what I see in my office,” or “It would have been helpful to focus more on this aspect, given how it plays out in practice.”

The broader purpose is to build that bridge between research and practice and strengthen the connection between the two communities. That’s the central idea behind the journal and what we’re working to accomplish.

When you think about who reads the journal, is it the same group of people who write for it? Who is the audience you’re trying to cultivate?

Yes, it’s largely the same group.

We’re focused on people involved in elections and those interested in election policy. That includes practitioners, researchers, and policy professionals. The field is so varied that it’s easy for people to become cloistered within their own state or locality and assume that the way they run elections is the way it’s done everywhere.

One of the most eye-opening aspects for readers is seeing just how many different ways elections can be administered. That exposure can spark ideas, encourage adaptation, and create connections across jurisdictions.

Ultimately, we’re trying to grow a community. When people understand they’re not alone in the challenges they face, it strengthens the field. Building community builds resilience, generates new ideas, and helps make election administration stronger overall. That’s what we’re aiming to do with the journal.

The word “practice” is in the title of the journal. What does that mean in real terms? How does it shape what you publish and what you seek out?

We’re not overly restrictive about what we publish, but we do prioritize work that focuses on the everyday concerns practitioners face. “Practice” means we’re looking for articles grounded in what election officials actually do day to day.

From the academic side, that often includes research examining how practitioners carry out their jobs, how policies affect their work, and how administrative systems function in real-world settings. We’re especially interested in research that connects directly to operational realities rather than staying purely theoretical.

Highlighting practice is important because election officials often feel overlooked, even within their own local governments. Outside of major election cycles, their work can be out of sight and out of mind. They may receive limited funding and attention despite the complexity and responsibility of their roles.

By emphasizing practice, we aim to bring that work to the forefront, make practitioners feel seen, and strengthen the broader election community.

If I’m an election official or practitioner on the non-academic side and I’m submitting something to the journal, what makes a submission compelling? What makes you want to publish it?

One thing we appreciate is voice.

Academic writing tends to be formal and structured, and it needs to be. It’s designed to be precise and minimize ambiguity. Practitioner submissions don’t have to follow that same model. In fact, we don’t want them to feel overly formal or stiff.

We’re looking for writing that’s clear, accessible, and grounded in real experience. It can be conversational. It should sound like you. We want readers to connect with what you’ve lived and what you’ve learned. It shouldn’t feel like a slog to get through.

Some of the strongest pieces we’ve published are firsthand accounts of how election officials responded to emergency events. We’ve run several articles about how officials navigated elections in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Those pieces almost read like short epics. You see the obstacles they faced, the decisions they had to make on the fly, and the pressure of preparing for an election just weeks after a major disaster. Readers can relate to that and learn from it.

We also have a practitioner reflection section where officials can talk about their personal experiences and how those experiences fit into the broader election landscape.

We want submissions that are interesting and thoughtful, even when they tackle complex issues. We’re not trying to simplify the field, but you don’t need an enormous vocabulary or highly technical language to make an impact. Clear, authentic, experience-driven writing is compelling to us.

And we’re always looking for new submissions.

Election administration has changed rapidly over the last decade. Academic journals are not always seen as fast-moving or immediately responsive. How do you keep the journal relevant in a rapidly changing environment?

A lot is changing quickly in election administration. At the same time, many of the core operational elements remain relatively constant. That balance helps.

We publish articles on topics that are both timely and foundational. For example, in a previous issue we included work on ranked choice voting and how it is implemented. In the current issue, we are finalizing an academic article on social media usage in elections. These topics may respond to current developments, but they also address structural questions that do not disappear after a single news cycle.

Academic research often involves longer-term studies, but that does not mean it becomes irrelevant quickly. In many cases, the findings remain useful a year or two later because the underlying administrative questions persist.

Another factor is the diversity of election systems across states. There is always something to examine because states approach policies differently. An article can serve as an educational resource. For example, someone may want to understand how same-day voter registration works in practice. We try to publish both policy-oriented perspectives and academic analyses so readers can see the issue from multiple angles. That gives them a fuller picture of what has worked, what challenges have emerged, and what might be improved.

Ultimately, readers decide how to apply what they learn. If a policy already exists in their state, they may use the research to strengthen it. If they are considering adopting something new, the journal provides material they can reference when answering questions from legislators or local officials. Even if an article is not about something that happened yesterday, it can still offer practical value for decision-making and long-term planning.

If you weren’t working in election administration or election administration-focused research, what would you be doing instead?

I always tell people my dream job would be to take over for Vanna White when she retires from Wheel of Fortune. Hopefully that won’t be for a long time.

It just seems like a great job. You press the letter, it lights up, and you get paid – what I assume is a decent amount of money – to do it.

Editor’s Note: Books & Ballots conversations are now being reposted to Spotify as part of our effort to make these discussions more accessible. You can now listen to full webinar recordings as podcast episodes, whether you’re commuting, traveling, or catching up between meetings. Be sure to follow the show on Spotify so you don’t miss future conversations.

What does it really mean to trust elections?

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In this recorded episode of Books & Ballots, we focused on public perceptions of elections — whether voters believe elections are free, fair, and conducted properly. Often described as “trust” or “confidence,” these perceptions shape how people experience and interpret the electoral process.

Academic researchers have spent years studying trends in election confidence, partisan differences, and the factors that influence public attitudes. In this conversation, three leading scholars shared findings they recently presented at the Southern Political Science Association Conference, unpacking the patterns, shifts, and insights they’re seeing in the data.

Joining the discussion:

• Dr. Lonna Atkeson (latkeson@fsu.edu), Florida State University LeRoy Collins Eminent Scholar in Civic Education and Political Science and Director of the LeRoy Collins Institute.

• Dr. Thad Kousser (tkousser@mail.ucsd.edu), Associate Dean of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and Co-Director of the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections.

• Dr. Mara Suttmann-Lea (csuttmann@conncoll.edu), Associate Professor of American Politics at Connecticut College and Andrew Carnegie Research Fellow.

Together, they explore what the research says about public confidence in elections, how those attitudes have evolved, and what it all means for election administrators, policymakers, and voters. Additional resources from their research are below

Books & Ballots is now hosted on Substack and is a partnership of The Elections Group, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and the MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL).

Resources

Dr. Suttmann-Lea’s research

Suttmann-Lea, Mara, Thessalia Merivaki, and Rachel Orey. 2025. “When Election Officials Speak, Do Voters Listen? Trust-Building Communications, Information Seeking, and Voter Confidence in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections.” Political Communication.

Mara Suttmann-Lea and Thessalia Merivaki. 2024. Voter Education Report for the US Election Assistance Commission. US Election Assistance Commission.

Merivaki, Thessalia, Mara Suttmann-Lea, Mary-Catherine McCreary, and Tyler Daniel. 2024. “The #TrustedInfo2022 Dataset: States’ Trust-Building Social Media Campaigns during the 2022 Election Cycle.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 24(4): 468–78.

Mara Suttmann-Lea and Thessalia Merivaki. 2023. “The Impact of Voter Education on Voter Confidence: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy 22(2): 145–65.

Election Official Communications Tracker Beta Version 2.0 (with Lia Merivaki)

Dr. Kousser’s research

Kousser, Thad, Lauren Prather, Laura Uribe, Theodoros Ntounias, Seth Hill, Mindy Romero, Cheryl Boudreau, Jennifer Merolla, Jennifer Gaudette, Mackenzie Lockhart. 2026. Trust in American Elections Has Declined Since 2024, Broad Concerns about ICE at Polling Places in 2026. Report from the UC San Diego Center on Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Gaudette, Jennifer, Seth J. Hill, Thad Kousser, Mackenzie Lockhart, and Mindy Romero. 2025. “Can Official Messaging on Trust in Elections Break Through Partisan Polarization?” British Journal of Political Science 55: e16.

Kousser, Thad, Jennifer Gaudette, Seth Hill, and Mindy Romero. 2025. “Can Informational Videos Increase Trust in Elections?” UC San Diego Center on Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Lockhart, Research Mackenzie, Jennifer Gaudette, Seth Hill, and Thad Kousser. 2025. “Can Prebunking Messages Convince Voters to Trust Delayed Results?” UC San Diego Center on Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Prather, Lauren, and Thad Kousser. 2025. “Can Election Facility Tours Increase Trust in Elections?” UC San Diego Center on Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Lockhart, Mackenzie, Jennifer Gaudette, Seth J Hill, Thad Kousser, Mindy Romero, and Laura Uribe. 2024. “Voters Distrust Delayed Election Results, but a Prebunking Message Inoculates against Distrust.” PNAS Nexus 3(10): pgae414.

Thad Kousser, Lauren Prather, Laura Uribe, and Alex Zhao. 2025. How Did Trust in Elections Change After the 2024 Elections. UC San Diego Yankelovich Center Report.

Dr. Atkeson’s research

Atkeson, Lonna Rae, Eli McKown-Dawson, and Robert M. Stein. 2025. “The Costs of Voting and Voter Confidence.” Political Research Quarterly 78(1): 22–37.

Atkeson, Lonna Rae, Eli McKown-Dawson, Jack Santucci, and Kyle L. Saunders. 2024. “The Impact of Voter Confusion in Ranked Choice Voting.” Social Science Quarterly 105(4): 1029–41.

Atkeson, Lonna Rae, R. Michael Alvarez, and Thad E. Hall. 2015. “Voter Confidence: How to Measure It and How It Differs from Government Support.” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy 14(3): 207–19.

Atkeson, Lonna Rae, and Kyle L. Saunders. 2007. “The Effect of Election Administration on Voter Confidence: A Local Matter?” PS: Political Science and Politics 40(4): 655–60.

The first featured presentation will be delivered by Derek Clinger of the State Democracy Research Initiative. He will discuss a proposal outlining how states could leverage unclaimed funds to support election administration. Following his presentation, Derek will take questions from participants.

The event will take place on Wednesday, March 4, at 12 p.m. ET. You can register here or by clicking below.

Register

If you’d like to review the full proposal in advance, it is available here.

For additional information, please contact Brandon Fincher at finchrb@auburn.edu.

The challenges of election administration funding are well known. Addressing them at scale requires thinking outside the box.

In 2025, Auburn University and the Election Center put out a call for ideas on innovative election funding solutions. Teams from across the country submitted proposals designed to encourage creative thinking and new collaborations between election officials and researchers. A panel of national experts evaluated the proposals and selected several contest winners, whose ideas will be translated into toolkits and other practical resources for election officials over the coming year.

In this webinar, we sat down with members of that expert panel to talk through the challenges of election funding, key takeaways from the contest and symposium, and what it will take to build solutions that actually work for election administrators.

The conversation features Professor Mitchell Brown (Auburn University), Professor Charles Stewart (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Matt Weil (Bipartisan Policy Center), and Karen Brinson Bell (Advance Elections).

This webinar is part of the 2026 Books & Ballots series, a partnership of The Elections Group, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), and the MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL), focused on connecting research and practice in the mechanics of democracy.

They’ve been the best kind of conversations, where people share what they’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known sooner.

About two years ago, after the annual Election Science, Reform, and Administration Conference, we started calling a subset of these conversations Books & Ballots. The idea was simple: bring the research (“books”) into conversation with the real-world work of administering elections (“ballots”).

Now, as the series heads into its third year – in collaboration with partners at the Center for Election Innovation & Research and the MIT Election Data + Science Lab – this Substack is the new home for those conversations.

Here you’ll find recordings and takeaways from our webinars and workshops, along with practical insights drawn from both research and lived experience. We’ll continue to focus on ideas you can use in your own office, whether that’s improving hiring and training, planning budgets, or designing better processes.

My hope is that this space makes good thinking more accessible and a little less abstract.

I’m glad you’re here.

For most voters, vote centers seem simple: instead of traveling to an assigned precinct, they can cast a ballot at any location in their area. But behind the scenes, significant planning, coordination, and logistics are required to get those centers up and running smoothly.

In this webinar, we explored the implementation and administration of vote centers. Researchers shared insights from recent studies, and local election officials discussed lessons learned and practical considerations from their own experience operating vote centers.

The election workforce is the backbone of American democracy, responsible for implementing complex election systems with integrity, accuracy, and transparency. While many programs have focused on supporting chief election officials and poll workers, far less attention has been given to the staff who handle the day-to-day operations — coordinating logistics, ensuring compliance, communicating with the public, and keeping election offices running smoothly.

In this conversation, we explored what it means to train and support the full bench of talent within election offices. The session featured ongoing research from the Center for Election Innovation & Research examining gaps and needs in workforce training, persistent challenges, and promising approaches that offices and partners across the field could consider.

How can engineering tools help election officials solve complex operational challenges? What innovations are available to support planning, resource allocation, and ballot management? And how can election administrators partner with STEM professionals to build the next generation of solutions?

In this webinar, we spoke with the Engineering for Democracy Institute (EDI) about tools designed specifically for election administrators. The session highlighted practical applications including VoteTime.app to estimate voter wait times, VBMTime.app to project vote-by-mail processing workloads, BallotStorage.app to calculate warehouse space and storage costs, and VoteLayout.app to design polling place layouts.

EDI also shared how engineering methods and direct collaboration with election officials are improving efficiency, resilience, and planning, and discussed opportunities to engage with STEM professionals through its Science for Election Needs (S4EN) initiative.

How can mail ballots be verified more quickly and accurately? What practices help prevent avoidable ballot rejections? And how can tabulation be made safer — and quieter — for election workers?

In this webinar, researchers and practitioners from the Engineering for Democracy Institute, King County (WA), U.S. Digital Response, the University of Southern California, and the University of Pennsylvania explored these questions and shared practical strategies to improve mail ballot verification, processing, and tabulation. The conversation highlighted real-world approaches election offices can use to strengthen both efficiency and security.

Who volunteers to be a poll worker? How do poll workers view their role? And how might recruiting trusted groups — like veterans and military families — strengthen trust in elections?

In this webinar, The Elections Group and the Center for Election Innovation and Research highlighted research from the Election Science, Reform, & Administration (ESRA) conference focused on what motivates people to serve as poll workers.

Professors Anita Manion, David Kimball, Matt Lamb, and Michael Hanmer shared and discussed their findings on poll worker motivations, beliefs, and recruitment strategies, and what those insights mean for election offices in practice.

This session was part of the Books & Ballots series, a partnership with the Center for Election Innovation & Research and Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory.

Elections are an essential government function. In this webinar, we looked at how they are funded — and what happens when funding falls short — focusing on the practical realities election offices face at the state and local levels.

Researchers from the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) and the Elections and Voting Information Center (EVIC) shared insights on common funding challenges, strategies for budgeting critical needs, and ways election offices can strengthen financial planning and long-term sustainability.