We invite conference paper and participation proposals for the 6th Annual Summer Conference on Election Science, Reform, and Administration. This in-person conference will commence on Wednesday, July 27 with an informal happy hour with drinks and heavy hors d’oeuvres. The conference will run through Friday, July 29 at the UNC Charlotte Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.
The goals of the conference are to engage the community of scholars and practitioners who work in election science and election administration. The conference invites research proposals from scholars in political science, public administration, law, computer science, statistics, and other fields who are working to develop rigorous empirical approaches to the study of how laws, technology, and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States and worldwide. Second, we wish to facilitate relationships between local election officials and scholars by enabling conversations allowing election officials to discuss research needs and scholars to discuss research abilities. Finally, we hope to senior and junior scholars in order to mentor future research in election science.
We hope that a wide variety of topics will be addressed at the conference. We are particularly interested in new and innovative projects that address long standing questions about the impact of election reforms on registration and turnout at both the state and federal level; how the voter experience has improved or eroded during the recent wave of election reforms and in relation to the pandemic; and the research design and methodological challenges in election science. The following is an incomplete list that provides a few sample ideas, but should not be considered exhaustive:
· Recent research about the cost of election administration or particular programs;
· Building public confidence in the legitimacy of elections;
· The threats to personal security of those running elections and how to maintain security;
· Election administration field’s succession planning and plans for continuity in leadership
· Redistricting in the 2020s and related issues;
· Implications of COVID and COVID reforms on future elections
· How election reform has differentially impacted historically disadvantaged segments of the electorate;
· The analytical and methodological tools needed to work with voter registration and voter history files, and challenges in making causal inferences when working with these files;
· New methods for connecting other behavioral records (e.g. survey data) or geospatial data with voter history and voter turnout data
Dr. Martha Kropf (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) and Kristin Mavromatis (Mecklenburg County, North Carolina Board of Elections) will serve as Program Co-Chairs. Drs. Mitchell Brown, Holly Garnett, and Zach Mohr will serve on the Program Committee. Drs. Kropf, Mohr, and McGowan will serve as conference hosts.
If you have questions, please contact: mekropf@uncc.edu, Kristin.Mavromatis@mecklenburgcountync.gov, zmohr@uncc.edu, brown11@auburn.edu; or Holly-Ann.Garnett@rmc-cmr.ca or cstewart@mit.edu.
Paper proposals of no more than 250 words should be submitted by March 1 to this website: https://uncc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ezH3FH0tIRMdSAe
You are welcome to register for the conference without participating. Registration for the conference will begin on April 15.
Interested participants can apply for limited travel support (more information available soon).
by March 1, 2022. We expect to announce decisions by April 15, 2022.
Further details about the conference will be posted at the conference website: https://electionlab.mit.edu/events/esra-2022.
Please feel free to redistribute this announcement to relevant individuals and email lists. We look forward to reading your paper proposals!