Michigan's election results can't get much faster

After Michigan updated laws surrounding the processing of absentee ballots, local clerks were able to begin opening, verifying, and scanning absentee ballots up to eight days before the state’s August primary, depending on the size of the city or town. In Detroit, election staff were able to report 80% of the absentee ballot results by 10:30 p.m. on election day, as opposed to the next morning, which clerks say helps avoid public concerns about election security.

Utah has universal vote-by-mail, in which every eligible voter receives a ballot in the mail ahead of elections. Even as other Republican-led states have placed more restrictions on voting by mail, Utah legislators have rejected proposed changes, and roughly three-quarters of likely voters in 2024 say they think the process produces “fair outcomes.”

To assuage concerns around election security, Ada County, Ohio created an online tool called Ballot Verifier that allows users to search every ballot cast in the county since 2022. County officials invited local election skeptics to be the first to test the new tool and received positive feedback on its level of transparency.

GARViS, Georgia’s new system for documenting voter records, stores information on roughly 7 million active voters and hundreds of thousands of inactive voters, including their addresses, assigned polling places, sample ballots, and early voting schedules. The George Secretary of State’s Office reports that the new system has helped cut down check-in time on election day from about a minute and a half per voter to about 47 seconds per voter, streamlining the process for both poll workers and residents.

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.

To make sure its elections run smoothly, the tiny election staff in one Pennsylvania county coordinates helpers from across the county government's departments, who process mail-in ballots while full-time staff oversee in-person voting. The office also invites the public to observe the election process and weigh in on important decisions, such as what type of voting machines are used.

After being criticized for its signature verification process during the 2020 election, Maricopa County, Arizona instituted additional strategies and safeguards leading up to 2022, including expanded training for election workers, additional signature samples for comparison, and a new audit process for approved signatures. The county saw an increase in the number of bad signatures rejected, with 1800 rejected in 2022 compared to 587 in 2020.

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.

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, election officials across the country ramped up their social media efforts by leveraging strategies used by those who spread disinformation, with many local governments using templates created by the National Association of State Election Directors. Officials also used social media to quell rumors and conspiracy theories in the midst of the election, such as in Maricopa County, where quick online outreach about technical difficulties with voting machines resulted in less online speculation than the county experienced in 2020.

Through the Estonian government's e-services, which include digital options for voting, paying taxes, storing identification, and more, the country saved roughly €280 million over the span of a decade thanks to the lower cost of collecting digital signatures.