W&M election law directors receive MIT grant to improve voter registration systems

James Alcorn and Rebecca Green have been awarded a national research grant from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab to study voter registration and list maintenance systems across the United States.

James Alcorn (left) and Rebecca Green's project, "Operational Timelines: Quantifying and Visualizing the Lifecycle of Voter List Maintenance," will focus on the legal timelines that govern how voter lists are maintained under federal and state law. (Courtesy photos)

The following story originally appeared on the website for W&M Law School. - Ed.

James Alcorn and Rebecca Green of William & Mary Law School's Election Law Program (ELP) have been awarded a national research grant from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab to study voter registration and list maintenance systems across the United States.

The grant is part of MIT's Practice-Oriented Research to Improve Voter Registration and List Maintenance program, which is supporting 10 nonpartisan research projects nationwide this year. The initiative is designed to provide practical, evidence-based guidance to election administrators who manage voter rolls amid increasing legal complexity, population mobility and political scrutiny.

James Alcorn is senior director of the ELP, providing leadership and expertise on matters of election law, and he also teaches election law at William & Mary.

Rebecca Green is a professor of law and co-director of the ELP, a joint project of the law school and the National Center for State Courts providing resources for judges deciding election disputes.

Alcorn and Green's project, "Operational Timelines: Quantifying and Visualizing the Lifecycle of Voter List Maintenance," will focus on the legal timelines that govern how voter lists are maintained under federal and state law. Although the U.S. Election Assistance Commission collects outcome data on voter list maintenance, the researchers note that little systematic work has been done on the statutory rules and timelines that shape these processes.

Using data from the Election Law Navigator, an online tool that the ELP designed to help judges, lawyers, elections officials and others efficiently navigate complex state election statutes, the team will extract and standardize voter list maintenance requirements found in state and federal statutes. The result will be a "List Maintenance Timeline Visualizer," a tool designed to help election officials, policymakers and courts better understand how list maintenance processes operate, how deadlines differ by state, and how changes in law can affect election administration workflows.

By transforming complex legal text into clear, dynamic process maps, the project aims to reduce compliance risks and support more informed, evidence-based election policy. Learn more.

David F. Morrill, W&M Law School, Senior Associate Director of University News

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