Summary
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) is the academic research collaboration that produced the foundational post-2000 US reports on voting-equipment failure rates, ballot-design hazards, and election-administration reform. Its calculators and datasets remain the empirical anchor for civic-design and election-math work.
Body
Following the 2000 US election, VTP researchers at Caltech and MIT conducted the first systematic national study of voting-equipment failure, ballot-error rates, and the cost of voter confusion. The resulting reports (including the widely cited Voting: What Has Changed, What Hasn’t, and What Needs Attention) anchored the Help America Vote Act reform process and remain primary sources for civic-design evidence. [source: caltech-mit-voting-tech]
VTP’s balloting-related calculators — vote-deficit models, residual-vote calculators, and ballot-complexity impact functions — give campaigns and election administrators quantitative tools for projecting the effect of ballot-design choices, polling-place changes, and rule reforms on turnout. The vote-deficit framing (“how many votes your design choice loses”) is the discipline civic-design borrows from the project. [source: caltech-mit-voting-tech]
The project is also an active research node on election integrity: studies of voting technology (paper vs. machine, hand-mark vs. BMD), election-administration practices, and the statistical detection of irregularities. The collaboration also staffs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology archive now hosted at Caltech. [source: caltech-mit-voting-tech]
Use it for
Citing the foundational US evidence on ballot-error rates, residual votes, and design-driven vote loss; running a vote-deficit calculation for a proposed ballot design; arguing for or against specific election-administration reforms with empirical anchors.