Lessons Learned: Navigating a Presidential Election During a Pandemic

The 2020 election has the potential to introduce challenges not only for voters searching for accurate information on candidates and voting procedures, but also for officials, poll workers, and cybersecurity experts working to administer and protect the electoral process. This award supports a workshop bringing together experts from a range of relevant fields to discuss lessons learned from the 2020 election.

The workshop will explore how our country can continually improve our electoral process to be resilient in the most trying of times while simultaneously advancing basic scientific research on all aspects of the voting process. By sparking long-term collaboration across scholars and practitioners that rarely engage with one another, the workshop will help generate new research ideas and partnerships that will chart the course for future election research.

The myriad challenges posed by 2020 elections provide a strong opportunity for interdisciplinary research (e.g., voter behavior at the intersection of political science, sociology, psychology, and information science; voting access at the intersection of election law, data science, and cybersecurity). However, traditional professional society meetings rarely enable the interdisciplinary dialogue necessary to develop a comprehensive understanding of the successes and shortcomings of the 2020 election.

The workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines, including law, political science, computer science, data science, and mathematics. The output from the workshop will be a widely-disseminated document that lays out the new or updated research problems and ideas that could lead to a potential NSF DCL to solicit new proposals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.