Learning from Elections: Call for Proposals
The MIT Election Data + Science Lab's Learning from Elections project seeks to support research that illuminates how the evolving election administration landscape has changed in recent years.
The Learning from Elections project seeks to fund research that addresses two types of topics: processes of election administration that were the focus of rapid innovation during the 2020 election or attention from state legislatures since then, and long-standing topics of concern to election administration that have recently “flown under the radar” but may now be ripe for reconsideration.
Visit: For more information, and to declare your intention to submit a proposal for consideration.
Learning from Elections
The 2020 election provided numerous challenges to the administration of elections in the United States.
The beginning of the presidential primary season coincided with the first reported deaths from COVID-19. The resulting public health emergency confronted everyone involved in setting and implementing election policy—from governors to precinct poll workers—with fundamental decisions that would affect whether the primaries could be held as planned and ultimately whether the general election would be accessible to all. In the end, primaries were held, nominees were selected, and a record number of Americans voted.
Ensuring that all eligible Americans would have access to a safe and reliable method of voting was an enormous undertaking, and required every state to at least alter standard operating procedures, and for most states, to change laws, regulations, and practices substantially. For the first time in history, most Americans cast their ballots before Election Day.
With these seismic shifts in election administration and in the spirit of continually improving election administration using an evidence-based approach, 2020 is a laboratory beyond compare.
About the Project
The Learning from Elections project seeks to use the present moment to lay an empirical foundation for the improvement of elections in the U.S. It is not blind to the challenges of conducting empirically focused research under the current circumstances, nor to the challenges of proposing empirically grounded paths to improvement. It does proceed with an assumption—or at least a maintained hypothesis—that there is an audience (even a hunger) for fact-based analysis of election administration and the potential for those paths to inform the evolution of law and professional practice in the coming years.
Through the project, we seek to support research that illuminates how the evolving election administration landscape has changed in recent years. Most of these changes coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, broadly considered, but election administration was evolving even before then. We are especially interested in projects that focus on mail balloting, voter registration, polling places and voter experience, administrative capacity, and combating misinformation about election administration. This project aims to support research that is grounded in the methods and theories of social science while simultaneously aiming to improve the practice of elections in the short- and medium terms.
Under this initiative, we seek to engage researchers who have a long track record in working in the fields of election administration and election science as well as those whose expertise has been focused on adjacent fields, but who wish to contribute to efforts to strengthen the practice of elections in the U.S. We anticipate that most applications will come from college and university researchers, but we welcome applications from other non-profit research entities, as well.
For more information, and to declare your intention to submit a proposal for consideration, please visit MEDSL's Learning from Elections project page.