Pop-Up Voting Centers Bring the Polls Directly to Unhoused Angelenos

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.

Texas' Countywide Polling Place Program allows residents to vote at any polling place in their home county, with the goal of making the election process more convenient and accessible. However, though some counties have seen turnout increase over time, others have seen it decrease in recent elections.

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.

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.

Community Solutions provides support and data analysis for municipalities trying to reach “functional zero,” when it becomes rare for a specific population, such as veterans or people who are chronically unhoused, to fall into homelessness. The milestone has been achieved by several communities, including Rockford, Illinois, and Abilene, Texas, but some, such as Bergen County, New Jersey, have struggled to maintain the standard long-term.

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.