Building Trust: Election Administration and the Role of Higher Education

This paper was published by Columbia World Projects. 

Building Trust advances recommendations in the public interest for more effective engagement by higher education institutions with election administrators to help buttress trustworthy election administration processes, strengthen the resilience of U.S. election infrastructure, and improve trust in election outcomes. The report is premised on the tenet that colleges and universities possess the capacity and the responsibility to reinforce trustworthy and trusted electoral systems.

The recommendations in this report are organized around a core set of ambitions. These include sustaining and increasing collaboration between academic researchers and election officials by crafting vibrant networks, improving data collection and data sharing practices, and promoting the study of election science across a more diverse range of institutions, disciplines, and researchers.

These suggestions fall into four principal categories:

1. Promote academic consultations with election officials. Universities should sustain and expand forums for election stakeholders and researchers to convene and discuss design deficiencies, administrative shortfalls, and innovative practices with the aim of offering under-resourced election offices guidance borne of rigorous expertise.
2. Reshape research practices to better serve election departments. Election science scholars should attune their research agendas, data collection, and visualization methods to the requirements and schedules of administrators to increase the probability that insights emerging from scholarly analyses will translate into procedural and administrative improvements.
3. Diversify institutions engaged in election research. The field of election science should reflect the diversity of the nation’s voters. A wider range of academic institutions, including land-grant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and community colleges, should become key participants in this work. Additionally, these institutions should forge new pathways geared to recruit a more diverse generation of academics to work on issues concerning election administration.
4. Invest in higher education-election administration partnerships. Significant investment by government and philanthropy is required to increase engagement by a greater array of universities, disciplines, and faculty and increase the number and depth of partnerships with practitioner groups and persons who administer the electoral system.