What we learned from the week our research led the headlines

The research we have done with VoteRiders to explore who lacks the proof of residency, identity, and citizenship they need to vote has generated extraordinary public interest, and has been part of the debate in Congress.

Our nationally representative survey has been covered in national publications like The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times, NBC, CNN, and National Public Radio. It’s been covered in regional outlets like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Ohio Capital Journal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Oklahoman, and Pensacola News Journal. Additionally, liberal leaning publications like Democracy Docket, Letters from An American, and Salon, as well as conservative leaning publications like Gateway Pundit, and The Federalist have covered our research.

Our state surveys have also been widely covered. Our Texas survey has been covered in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Texas Tribune, Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Current, and Austin American-Statesman. Earlier this month, the release of our new survey of Californians was covered in the Palm Springs Desert Sun, KQED, and syndicated by many local media outlets across the state.

And when the U.S. Congress began debating the SAVE America Act last month, we saw even more engagement. Results from this research were repeated frequently in both committee hearings and on the floor in both chambers of Congress. Senator Mike Lee of Utah gave a speech on the Senate Floor where he discussed the methodology of our national survey at length and shared his perspective about how it should inform the policy debate. In a House hearing, Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico can be seen actually reading part of our report into the record during her remarks. Our research really was central in this debate.

We’ve learned a lot from this experience about our research process and our strategy for generating new knowledge about politics with partners. Here’s what we’re taking forward from this experience both for our continued work on ID / DPOC (documentary proof of citizenship) issues and the rest of our research portfolio.

VoteRiders brings truly unique expertise to this research partnership. They’re not just a policy think tank. They have field organizers in states across the country who help individual people access the documents they need to vote. They run a helpline for people struggling to access ID or encountering ID related barriers to voting. They do public education campaigns to tell the stories of people struggling to access ID and proof of citizenship and help ensure that people know what ID they need to vote in their particular state. VoteRiders’ organizers and policy staff regularly testify and engage with debates at both the state and federal levels about proposals to change how voters verify their residency, identity, and citizenship. Through that work, the VoteRiders team has generated extraordinary expertise in the reality of how these policies impact voters and how debates about them unfold.

That expertise enabled the success of our research. The partnership initially grew out of a specific pain point that VoteRiders was having in their work. In 2023, there was no recent data that allowed them to rigorously estimate how many people would be affected by new policy proposals. The VoteRiders team was left with no choice but to cite reports from nearly two decades ago in testimony and interviews. Major national surveys like the Current Population Survey, American National Election Studies, and Cooperative Election Studies only ask about some of the documents an eligible voter can use to vote. People who don’t have a license or passport might still have something else that would be permissible in their state, but those surveys don’t tell us if they have these documents. In addition, many state laws require the documents people use to vote to be current in several different ways that are beyond the scope of these larger surveys. Without new surveys specifically designed to answer these questions, it would not be possible to rigorously estimate how many voters would be impacted in various policy scenarios. As if the issue was not challenging enough already, nationally representative surveys also could not be used to generate the state level estimates most relevant to many election policy debates.

Our process for exploring questions with partners over time served us well here. We built expertise together as we expanded the project from reanalyzing existing datasets to administering our own national survey to developing state based surveys tailored to the unique needs of state policy makers in particular states. We developed strategies to reverse engineer state policies into a set of survey questions (sometimes in multiple languages!) and sampling procedures that could answer the most important questions about these policies. That shared expertise put us in position for the research to have outsized impact when shifting political contexts put the issue of voter ID and requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote at the forefront of the Congress’s agenda in 2026.

At the Mpact Conference on public impact research last month in College Park we had the chance to share a bit more about this work with Florence Rabanal from the National Science Foundation and Adam Seth Levine from Research4Impact and Johns Hopkins University.

There is a robust field of funders, scholars, and intermediary organizations working to “close the gap between research and outcomes”. This is worthy and crucial work that makes sure that the knowledge we create at universities – often with extensive support from state and federal taxpayers – is shared and translated widely so that all of society can benefit. At CDCE we are incredibly lucky to work in a setting where the University as a whole, the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the Department of Government and Politics are making extensive investments to support the public impact of research.

In many cases, people come to research with authentic curiosity and openness to any finding. Citrus farmers use research to understand the diseases killing their plants. The world has problems and mysteries and researchers (sometimes!) have answers. We work on many issues like this. Our work tracking the shift of Maryland voters towards voting before Election Day or understanding the use of food at voting locations and other similar projects are good examples. While there are certainly stakeholders for these projects who might prefer some results to others, most research users are coming to the projects open to many potential findings and interpretations.

Other projects – especially our work on who lacks the proof of residency, identity, and citizenship they need to vote – are not like that. Many (though certainly not all!) of the policy makers and media producers engaging with our research already have deeply held beliefs about both election policy and what they think the affects of those policies will be. Often, they’re only interested in engaging with the research to the extent that it supports those beliefs.

What are our responsibilities as researchers when engaging with research users who have this type of closed orientation towards the findings? What metrics should we use to assess the public impact of our research in these situations? If we evaluate ourselves only on the extent to which research is being used by media and policy makers, are we really just measuring whether one side or another found the findings to be particularly congenial to their existing beliefs? Should we assign particular value to public engagement where findings encourage people to think critically about strongly held beliefs or consider them with new depth or from a different perspective? We know it is emotionally challenging and mentally costly for people to change their minds. What can we learn about the best way to do public impact research when emotionally challenging results need to be presented in emotionally intelligent ways so that research users can access the full benefits of the research?

While we have many questions, one thing we are sure about is the importance of doing this type of public impact research even (especially!) when the issues involved are highly contentious. Even if many research users are not engaging with the research with a truly open mind, the research still plays a powerful role in grounding public debates in reality and data, and not just conjecture based on prior commitments. As researchers we all need to think more critically about the most productive ways to present research about polarized issues.

At CDCE, we’re really passionate about exploring the mysteries of how politics works. We do our best work when we connect with partners who share this passion. Lauren Kunis and the team at VoteRiders are incredibly passionate about serving every American who lacks the proof of residency, identity, and citizenship they need to vote. And so they’re also really passionate about figuring out who those people are. Together, we’re able to do great things. That type of fundamental shared commitment to figuring out something that really matters to people is at the core of all of our most successful projects at CDCE.

So what do you really want to know about politics? Something about your neighborhood or community or campus? Something happening in your election office or political organization? We want to hear from you! Please reach out to us with your ideas and thoughts about how we can have a big impact by learning more about the questions that matter to you and your community.

Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. Mike Hanmer is the Director of the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, the Michael Miller Endowed Faculty Fellow in Government and Politics, and co-Principal Investigator of the Maryland Democracy Initiative.