Boston Sunday Globe

Rhode Island ranked in top 6 in running efficient elections

- By Dan McGowan GLOBE COLUMNIST Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.

Last week’s presidenti­al primary day in Rhode Island was undoubtedl­y anticlimac­tic. We already knew that President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump had clinched their party’s respective nomination­s, so the results in the Ocean State and Connecticu­t, New York, and Wisconsin hardly sent shockwaves through the country.

Still, it’s a good moment to highlight that Rhode Island does, in fact, run pretty efficient elections. MIT’s Elections Performanc­e Index ranked the state No. 6 in the country for the 2022 election.

What goes into such a ranking? MIT considered a wide range of factors – voter turnout and registrati­on, overall electoral infrastruc­ture, and the administra­tion of in-person and mail ballot voting – in every state, and only New Mexico, Michigan, Colorado, Vermont, and Nebraska came out ahead of Rhode Island. Some of the findings are really wonky, but here are a few Rhode Island highlights:

• The state had a 86 percent voter registrati­on rate – better than the national average – but its 43.87 percent turnout rate was slightly lower than average.

• Rhode Island’s registrati­on rejection rate was less than 1 percent, compared to the national average of 6.39 percent.

• Only 1.49 percent of mail ballots were unreturned, compared to 14.49 percent nationally.

• The average in-person voting waiting time was 2.6 minutes, compared to 5 minutes nationally.

This is a big improvemen­t for Rhode Island, which ranked No. 33 in 2014 before Nellie Gorbea was elected secretary of state (she left office after the 2022 election). She spearheade­d several changes that helped Rhode Island dramatical­ly shoot up the charts.

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