Promoting a Healthy Election During the Pandemic

When Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart III worked on the non-partisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, they were looking to solve problems such as long lines at polling stations, access to voting technology, and voting during a natural disaster. At the time, they never thought about how a pandemic might affect voting, and yet the two are currently thrust into service around that very issue, says Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor Law at Stanford, who was the Senior Research Director of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

“Charles and I have lots of connections with local election officials and have a generally non-partisan reputation. There are plenty of groups that were filling that sort of familiar interest groups that were filling the void on this, but we thought that there was a need for a group that was dedicated to these management issues, so we started up the Healthy Elections Project with the goal, not just of putting out our own research, but also helping election officials make transitions that they needed and helping direct funds toward other nonpartisan NGOs that were working on election management issues,” he said.

The result of this work is the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which is focused on making sure this year’s election will proceed with “integrity, safety, and equal access.” Stanford and MIT aren’t the only organizations involved, either. The site—and project—brings together a variety of experts including academics, civic organizations, election administrators, and election administration experts to assess and promote best practices in the field.

Persily and Stewart, who is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, and Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, embarked on an extensive educational campaign, penning articles and opinion pieces in a variety of publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. At the grassroots level, Stanford’s design school is producing materials that will help inform election administrators, providing documents and signage around health polling places. In addition, both schools have published more than 500 pages of Stanford and MIT student research to educate the public, the media, social media—they’ve helped Facebook with policy—and polling place workers. Some of the papers are part of a for-credit class at Stanford called the Election Project Policy Lab

“Those papers include [topics about] everything from election restriction supply chain to valid drop boxes to signature verification to violence in polling places to try to provide a public and election administrators the most contemporary research,” Persily explains. “We’ve also spawned out to other areas such as poll worker recruitment and work closely with the American Federation of Pro Bono Counsel.” That work encompasses a litigation tracker, where readers can find details and case law related to more than 300 election-related court cases across the country.

Despite the amount of work that’s gone into the project, Persily says that it’s something that probably won’t endure after November. “The thing that makes our efforts unique is that we are popping up and then disappearing,” he says. “We are narrowly targeted at the election administration effects of the pandemic. Hopefully, we won’t have to go through this again next year.”