Claim OwnershipThe Election Science Office Hours Podcast
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© Professor R. Michael Alvarez, Caltech
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Let’s help voters be confident that their ballots are counted as cast. Honest conversations between host, Caltech prof and election expert Mike Alvarez, and election officials, researchers, and other stakeholders about elections.
30 Episodes
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Join us for this amazing episode with Michael Spector and Delaney Gomen, both from Georgia Tech. We talk about their new paper that uses innovative HCI methods to learn from election officials about usability issues they face using election technology. Along the way we talk quite a bit about how to improve trust between the research and elections community, so that more productive collaborations like this can be launched.
Join me as I talk with Betsy Sinclair about the work that we did in 2025 on AI and elections. In 2025 we organized and hosted two major conferences, bringing together researchers, election officials, election technologists, and stakeholders. Our first conference focused on information and elections, and then the second on how new AI technologies might be used to improve election administration. Throughout we also talked about the risks of new AI technologies for election administration.
In this episode, I talk with three experts on military and overseas voting, Casandra Hockenberry, Paul Lux, and Hilary Rudy. We talk about the hurdles that military and overseas voters face when they try to received and return their ballots. We also discuss the procedural and technological solutions that help mitigate and resolve these hurdles.
Join me as I talk with USC prof Christian Grose, as we go over the November 4, 2025 election results. What happened in the major races across the US on November 4th, including in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia. We also focus attention on California's Proposition 50. What do these election results mean, both for where American politics stands today, and for what we might expect in the 2026 midterm elections?
Join me as I discuss with Caltech prof Jonathan N. Katz the current round of mid-decade partisan gerrymandering. We focus attention on Texas and California, discussing in particular California's Proposition 50. We talk about Jonathan's work on elections and redistricting as well!
On this episode, I talk with Ben Adida, the founder of VotingWorks. Ben has done important scientific research on voting systems early in his career, and we discuss his thoughts about cyptography and elections and the early history of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (where we met!). We talk about why he founded VotingWorks, and why it was founded as a nonprofit business. And we discuss Ben's thinking about how AI might improve election administration, in particular how AI might be used to improve the accessibility of the elections process.
In this episode, Matt Masterson joins me to talk about election security and election administration. Matt is Senior Director, Elections and Societal Resilience at Microsoft; previously he was a Commissioner and Chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. We talked about election security, voter registration databases. There's also a great part of the conversations about AI and election administration!
California's controversial mid-cycle redistricting proposal will be on the state's ballot on November 4th. Now that the proposed maps are out, it's time to start to dig into how they might change the state's congressional delegation. Join me as I talk about one important aspect of these changes - how the new maps, if enacted, might reshape political representation for Asian Americans in California.
Here I talk with Justin Levitt about why Texas is considering redrawing their Congressional district lines now, what other states are considering in response, and what it all might mean for the 2026 midterm elections.
Earlier in July I had a chance to talk with Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico's Chief Election Officer. We talked about election administration in New Mexico, focusing on election reforms and election security. We also talked about what a Secretary of State's job entails, and learned about Maggie's plans once her current term in office is complete!
In this episode, Kim Wyman and I discuss threats to election security, what was done in the 2020 election to mitigate threats and what we should be doing to prepare to mitigate new threats looking ahead to the 2026 and 2028 elections.
In this episode of Election Science Office Hours I talk with Betsy Sinclair from WashU. Betsy and I chat about AI and election governance, election rumors, and a conference that we are planning for October at WashU. Betsy is one of the early election scientists, having written many studies about election administration and election science in the last two decades.
In this episode of Election Science Office Hours, I talk with Professor Gretchen Macht of the University of Rhode Island. She is an engineer by training, and has developed an important and unique research agenda working to improve election administration. We talk about her work, how she engages with election officials, and how she is developing new networks for bring more engineers and STEM researchers into election science. It's a great episode, full of energy and enthusiasm!
In this special episode of Election Science Office Hours, I talk with Stephan Lewandowsky, prof at the University of Bristol, about his innovative research on AI microtargeting. Stephan has shown that AI can be used to develop personally-targeted persuasive advertisements. This of course has important implications for upcoming elections worldwide and for democratic discourse. This talk and conversation was originally recorded January 17, 2025, as part of a conference hosted by Caltech.
Join me as I talk with Justin Levitt, from LMU Law School, as we discuss President Trump's executive orders on elections, the legal wrangling now going on regarding those executive orders, and what we can expect to happen regarding these executive orders between now and the 2026 midterm elections.
In this episode, originally recorded on March 12, 2025, I talk with Paul Gronke (Reed College) and Paul Manson (Portland State University) about their Elections & Voting Information Center and most importantly about their ongoing local election officials survey project. What do we know about local election officials? How do their like their jobs? How do you go about surveying local election officials? This is a great episode for anyone interested in election science and how elections are run in the US.
This is the final episode of Election Science Office Hours for 2024! Here I talk with Jennifer Morrell, one of the world's leading experts on election auditing. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present, and future of election auditing in the U.S. Make sure to listen, as Jennifer provides great insights about innovations in election auditing and also gives some great research tips for the election science geeks in the audience!
In this episode I talk with Tommy Gong, Deputy Clerk-Recorder of Contra Costa County. We talk about how he and his colleagues worked to prevent the spread of election misinformation and rumors in 2024, the financing of election administration, and Tommy's "trifecta" of efforts to improve voter trust in elections.
Our second post-election episode, with Christian Grose (University of Southern California) and Andrew Sinclair (Claremont McKenna College). Election reforms like ranked choice voting, primary reforms, and redistricting commissions, were on the ballot in many states in the 2024 election. Many of these measures failed or struggled with voters. Why? What might these struggles portend for the future of election reform at the ballot box? How can election reformers respond? This is a great episode if you are interested in election reform. Note that there is a little feedback in the first few seconds of the audio, per our usual policy we have not edited the audio track to bring you the entire conversation, as it occurred.
Charles Stewart III from MIT joins me, on the morning after the November 5th 2024 election. We discuss his work on the CBS Decision Team, why the administration of the election went smoothly, what to expect from federal election reform, and some ideas for research coming out of the 2024 election.
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