50 State Post-Vote Guide: Overview

As Informing Democracy has undergone research into the vote counting and certification processes, we were struck by how much variety exists in these processes across the country. One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is gaining a comprehensive overview of these processes across states and have been working to understand how best to compare these processes across states.

This 50 State Post-Vote Guide seeks to solve that problem, providing an overview of the counting and certification processes across all 50 states.

We hope that this database will serve as a resource for advocates and policy makers, litigators, the press, and the public for better understanding how the vote counting and certification process work across our nation.

• For advocates and policy makers, we hope this can serve as a resource to better understand how your state’s laws and procedures compare with others, and use that information to advocate for and inspire change or fuel protective and corrective action.
• For lawyers,** a 50 state survey will be a familiar resource that you can use as a first resource to direct legal research on Lexis or WestLaw or to cite best practices as a secondary authority in a legal brief.
• For the press*,* we hope this will serve as a reliable resource to help better understand the key systems in our election certification processes for use in your reporting.
• For the public*,* we hope this database serves as an authoritative resource for those seeking to learn more about our election processes and to instill greater confidence in these essential systems.

How to Use this Database

State Comparison Views

The information in this database can be viewed comparatively across all states using the following 6 tabs:

• Jurisdictional Lay of the Land: Who administers elections at the state and local level.
• Local Canvass & Certification: Who counts and certifies votes at the local level, and when it happens.
• State Canvass & Certification: Who counts and certifies votes at the state level, and when it happens.
• Pre-Canvassing: Who counts mail ballots early, and when it happens.
• Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs)
• Other Audits: Such as hand counts and procedural audits.

Single State View

You can also view all of the information about each state on its own page by clicking on “open” next to the name of a state in the database

Additional Views

You can also sort by any of the columns in the database, as well as sort (such as by deadline or name of an official) and search for key words.

“Last Updated”

Please be aware laws and regulations may change throughout the year. We will update this database periodically. Please note the “last updated” date for each state which you can see on the State View and the last column on the Jurisdictional Lay of the Land View.

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Database Access

To protect the sensitive information found in this research, we ask that you complete this sign up form to gain access to the full database. Once you complete the form, you will be sent a unique link to the database. We ask that once you have this link you only share it with trusted partners and allies.

Click here to request database access.

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Guidance on Database Citation

Recommended citation: “50 State Post-Vote Guide: How We Count, Canvass, Certify, and Audit Our Elections.” Informing Democracy, Jan 29, 2024.

Short form: “50 State Post-Vote Guide.”

Calendars of Post-Vote Processes

One of the goals of creating this 50 State Post-Vote Guide was to provide an overview of the timeline and deadlines for key post-vote processes. We hope these calendars will be valuable to partners and allies in monitoring and protecting our democracy. We recommend bookmarking these calendars, as well as sharing them with colleagues and partners.

These calendars cover these post-vote processes in each state:

• Pre-Canvassing: This includes when pre-canvassing of vote-by-mail ballots can start and when these ballots begin to be scanned or fed into tabulators.