Volunteer-powered N.H. elections buoyed by national recruitment campaigns

Ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to pick multiple candidates for their vote to be transferred to if their first choice fails to advance, has now been approved in at least 60 jurisdictions, including Alaska, where it helped Democrat Mary Peltola defeat Republican Sarah Palin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To help fill poll worker shortages and fight mis- and disinformation around the 2022 midterm elections, nonpartisan nonprofit We the Veterans launched a nationwide campaign called Vet the Vote, which recruits veterans and military members to serve as election officials. The campaign has signed up roughly 60,000 poll workers so far.

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.