The National Election Knowledge Survey

Funded by my Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, this project measures and evaluates what the public actually understands about how to vote and how elections are secured. Standard political knowledge research focuses on representational knowledge, asking questions about who holds office, how governance is structured, and how representation unfolds. Far less attention has been paid to whether voters understand the technical procedures that govern their own participation: proof-of-citizenship requirements, mail ballot deadlines, list maintenance practices, post-election audits. These gaps have direct consequences. Voters who don’t know how to navigate election processes are more likely to encounter barriers to successful voting, more vulnerable to misinformation, and less likely to have confidence that votes are counted as intended.

In November 2025, I fielded a nationally representative election knowledge survey with over-samples of registered voters in the states of Arizona, North Carolina, New York, and Virginia. The results were sobering: while respondents showed reasonable familiarity with basic voting mechanics, they exhibited substantial misunderstanding of election security procedures. However, those with greater overall knowledge expressed more positive perceptions of their local election offices and election outcomes. This finding has direct implications for the design of public education efforts, and has already informed the work of the New York State Board of Elections and Indiana’s Certificate Election Administration, Technology, and Security Program.

I have secured funding from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab to re-run this survey for the 2026 election cycle, incorporating items on voter registration, list maintenance, and an embedded experiment testing communication strategies drawn directly from the Election Communications Tracker Data.