Election Administration and Voting Survey 2020 Comprehensive Report - EAC

ELECTION ADMINISTRATION AND VOTING SURVEY 2020 COMPREHENSIVE REPORT

A REPORT FROM THE U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION

TO THE 117TH CONGRESS

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Executive Summary

Since 2004, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has conducted the Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) following each federal general election. The EAVS asks all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories--American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands--to provide data about the ways Americans vote and how elections are administered. Since 2008, this project has included a separate survey, the Election Administration Policy Survey (Policy Survey), that collects information about state election laws, policies, and practices.

The EAVS provides the most comprehensive source of state and local jurisdiction-level data about election administration in the United States. These data play a vital role in helping election officials, policymakers, and other election stakeholders identify trends, anticipate and respond to changing voter needs, invest resources to improve election administration and the voter experience, and better secure U.S. elections infrastructure. The EAVS data make it possible to examine the details of the U.S. election infrastructure and to produce a generalizable understanding of core aspects of the election process and the management challenges faced by election officials. The survey provides policymakers and the public with critical information every two years about how federal elections are conducted, and it helps the EAC fulfill its congressionally mandated reporting requirements. The EAVS is also invaluable to election officials who use the data to manage election oversight, conduct issue analysis and strategic planning, and create training and promotional materials. The EAC also uses EAVS data to create clearinghouse resources to advance the agency's mission and to better support election officials and voters as well as to inform lawmakers and national-level stakeholders about the impact of federal voting laws and the changing landscape of U.S. elections.

The 2020 general election was heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic and the ensuing public health emergency necessitated a variety of changes to existing election practices to accommodate social distancing and to slow the spread of the virus among voters, poll workers, and election officials and staff. In response, many states took action to expand the availability of inperson voting before Election Day and mail voting. Because of its status as the most comprehensive survey of election administration in the United States, the 2020 EAVS serves as a record of the extraordinary efforts by the nation's election officials and poll workers to ensure that the 2020 general election was conducted in a safe and secure manner. To this end, the EAC is pleased to present to the 117th Congress its report on the 2020 EAVS.

This report describes in detail how the 2020 federal general election was administered and how voters cast their ballots. Data from the EAVS and the accompanying Election Administration Policy Survey (Policy Survey) are used to provide an overview of each of the following aspects of the election process:

? Turnout, voting methods, polling places, poll workers, and election technology are covered in Chapter 1, "Overview of Election Administration and Voting in the 2020 General Election";

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? Key laws, rules, policies, and procedures that govern U.S. elections are covered in Chapter 2, "Election Law and Procedure: The Policy Survey";

? Voter registration and list maintenance are covered in Chapter 3, "Voter Registration: The NVRA and Beyond";

? Voting by individuals covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) is described in Chapter 4, "Military and Overseas Voting in 2020: UOCAVA"; and

? Finally, the methodology of the EAVS and a description of the survey questions are discussed in Chapter 5, "Survey Methodology and Procedures."

Voting and Election Administration Findings

The 2020 EAVS confirms that the 2020 general election saw the highest turnout of any federal general election recorded by the EAVS to date, with 67.7% of the citizen voting age population (CVAP) casting ballots that were counted, an increase of 6.7 percentage points from 2016 levels. Nearly every state saw an increase in turnout compared to the 2016 EAVS. Furthermore, more than 209 million people were active registered voters for the 2020 general election, which represents an alltime high, and more than 161 million voters cast ballots that were counted for this election.

This election also saw sweeping changes in how voters cast their ballots. In the 2016 EAVS, 54.5% of voters cast their ballots in person on Election Day, and in the 2018 EAVS, 58.2% of voters did so. In 2020, only 30.5% of voters cast their ballots in person on Election Day. The percentage of the electorate that voted a mailed ballot increased to 43.1% of the electorate, nearly a 20-percentagepoint increase from 2016 levels. Jurisdiction-level analysis shows that the largest increases in mail voting rates occurred in jurisdictions in states that newly instituted all-mail elections in 2020 and in jurisdictions in states that removed requirements to provide an excuse to request a mailed ballot. Although the total number of mailed ballots transmitted in 2020 was more than double the number transmitted in 2016, the percentages of mailed ballots that were returned by voters, that were counted, and that were rejected did not change significantly at the national level.

States reported a total of 132,556 polling places at which 775,101 poll workers assisted voters with in-person early and Election Day voting. The data also show a shift in the age distribution of poll workers, with the percentage of poll workers ages 18 to 25 and 26 to 40 increasing to 6.2% and 15.0%, respectively, and the percentage of poll workers ages 61 to 70 and 71 and older decreasing, to 27.3% and 20.1%, respectively. Jurisdictions also reported that poll worker recruitment was less difficult in 2020 than it was in 2016. In survey comments, many jurisdictions cited cross-cutting effects on their recruitment efforts. Jurisdictions reported that the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to retain long-time, older poll workers and caused last-minute poll worker shortages, but the efforts of the EAC, state election offices, and other organizations to encourage qualified individuals to serve as poll workers were cited as helping contribute to an oversupply of poll workers in some areas.

States reported that the use of electronic poll books (or e-poll books) increased since the 2018 EAVS, and 17 states used e-poll books in all of their jurisdictions. Scanners and ballot marking devices (BMD) continued to be the most common types of voting equipment used, and the use of

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direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines that were not equipped with a voter-verified paper audit trail (DRE without VVPAT) also continued to decline. In 2020, only 32 jurisdictions across the country relied solely on voting machines with no paper backup.

Election Administration Policy Survey Findings

To provide context to the data that states report in the EAVS, the EAC collects information about states' election policies. Two-thirds of states reported having top-down registration systems hosted on a single, central platform or mainframe that is maintained by the state with information supplied by local jurisdictions; the remaining one-third of states reported having bottom-up or hybrid databases. To keep their voter registration rolls accurate and up to date, most states reported sharing information with motor vehicle agencies, government entities that maintain death records, and agencies that maintain felony or prison records. The percentage of states offering both sameday registration (51.8%) and online registration (80.4%) increased since the 2018 Policy Survey.

The Policy Survey also recorded an increase in state policies that make it safer for voters to cast a ballot or to reduce potential lines and crowds at in-person polling places. In 2020, a total of 14 states reported having all-mail elections, in which all registered voters or all active registered voters were automatically sent a mailed ballot--10 of these states conducted all-mail elections statewide, whereas four of the states did so only in select jurisdictions. This was an increase from the 2018 Policy Survey, which found that three states administered their elections entirely by mail and four states had all-mail elections in select local jurisdictions. In addition, 69.6% of states did not require voters to provide an excuse to be able to vote a mailed ballot (seven states had removed the excuse requirement since the 2018 Policy Survey), and 51.8% of states reported that there were some circumstances under which voters could receive ballots electronically. However, the Policy Survey did not collect information on whether policy changes made for the 2020 general election were permanent or temporary, or whether the changes were made in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearly all states reported that voting systems must be tested and certified before approval, with the most common certification requirements being testing by an EAC-accredited voting system test laboratory (VSTL), certification according to the EAC-adopted Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), and both state and federal certification. In 2020, of the 40 states that reported using e-poll books, 55% required testing and certification to the state's specifications before purchasing the e-poll books.

In the post-election period, 78.6% of states reported that they required a tabulation audit to verify the voting equipment used to count ballots worked properly. Of these states, about three-quarters required a traditional tabulation audit (which examines a sample of ballots from a fixed percentage of randomly selected voting districts or voting machines), whereas about one-fifth of the states required a risk-limiting tabulation audit (in which statistical methods are used to select the audit sample size). All states reported having a mechanism for conducting election recounts, although the circumstances under which a recount would be conducted varied by state.

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