Exploring the Impact of Countywide Polling in Dallas County

Los Angeles County’s Flex Vote Center Program establishes polling locations at shelters, transitional housing sites, and service centers for people who are unhoused or face other barriers to voting. In 2020, nearly 2,800 people cast their ballots through the Flex program.

Residents who participated in Michigan’s first year of early in-person voting say they appreciated the shorter lines, the convenience to vote on their own schedules, and the ability to feed their ballots into polling place tabulators themselves. Nearly 4,600 voters cast their ballots early in-person across the state.

Estonia's e-governance system allows citizens to register for social programs, access health records, and complete most government business digitally. In March 2023, more than half of the country's voters cast their ballots via the internet for the first time.

To boost turnout in local elections that often see low participation, cities such as Berkeley, Calif. and Ann Arbor, Mich. have shifted their election cycles to match up with higher-profile presidential contests. Researchers found that moving municipal elections to sync up with presidential elections boosts turnout by an average of 29 percent, and at least 11 communities approved similar measures this year to make the switch to even-year elections.

Power the Polls is a national campaign that coordinates with companies and organizations across the political spectrum to reach out to potential election volunteers. The campaign then shares the volunteer's information directly with local election officials, with the goal of bolstering the pool of available poll workers.

Amid poll worker shortages spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and safety concerns for election officials, some states are tapping a new generation of election staffers by recruiting in the places where young people already hang out, including breweries and community colleges. Kentucky's partnership with breweries helped the state sign up roughly 5,000 people to work the polls in 2020.

States such as Washington and California have nonpartisan "top-two" primaries, in which the top two vote getters move on to the general election regardless of their party affiliation. In Washington, voter turnout in primary elections has jumped from 18 percent in 2003, before the law went into effect, to nearly 55 percent in 2020.

After procedural errors such as missing dates and signatures caused a significant number of ballots to be rejected, Pennsylvania redesigned its mail ballots to emphasize the areas voters must fill out correctly for their ballot to be counted. Following the redesign, 9.6 percent fewer ballots were rejected for errors the new design tried to address, but other types of mistakes, such as voters not adding the year to the date, increased.

Since 2018, three Vermont cities have passed measures allowing noncitizen voters to participate in municipal elections. This gives them the opportunity to weigh in on matters that affect all local residents regardless of their immigration status, from school budgets to road projects.

For its mayoral elections, Minneapolis uses ranked-choice voting, a process that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than choosing just one. The system, along with the state's culture of civic engagement and its ease of voting, is believed to have contributed to record-high turnout during the 2021 election, when more than half of registered voters in the city cast a ballot.