Certificate in Election Administration at University of Minnesota

As of 2025, the Certificate in Election Administration program was listed as an official affiliate of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL), a left-leaning election and polling statistics center housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). ^{2 3}

The program and its faculty espouse a left-of-center perspective on election policy. The program offered both a course and a conference in the fall of 2025 in which its leadership directly criticized President Donald Trump and his administration’s election law proposals. ⁴

Background

The Certificate in Election Administration at University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs is an online higher education program that aims to familiarize election officials with technology and methods pertaining to election administration as well as with the “legal and policy challenges facing our voting system.” ¹

The program was created in “direct response” to the Obama administration’s 2014 Presidential Commission on Election Administration report, which called on universities to offer courses on election systems. ¹

Program

The Certificate in Election Administration is an online program and touts itself as flexible to appeal to professionals with busy schedules. It markets itself to managers employed in state and local election offices as well as aspiring election administrators. Completing the course awards students with 12 education credits. Students receive either a post-baccalaureate certificate if they have a bachelor’s degree or an undergraduate certificate if they have one year of work experience or 45 college credits. As of 2025, each undergraduate credit cost $620.50 and each graduate credit cost $1,179. The program offers group tuition discounts for multiple employees from the same institution. ¹

As of September 2025, classes in the program’s course catalog included “Voter Outreach and Participation,” “Data Analysis for Election Administration,” “Elections Security: How to Protect America’s Elections,” and “Election Policy in the Second Trump Administration.” The description for the course on President Donald Trump claimed he has “aggressively sought to change U.S. election policy” and highlighted his efforts to push proof of citizenship for voter registration, his proposals to restrict mail-in balloting, and his resistance to previous changes made in the name of resisting Russian interference. ^{1 4}

The program maintains a playlist of its webinars on its YouTube page. Topics discussed include “Election Policy in the Second Trump Administration,” financial support for election offices, voting rights for incarcerated persons, “Artificial Intelligence and Elections,” “Creating a Culture of Continuous Election Auditing,” “Overcoming Barriers to Native American Voting,” “Dealing with Election Disinformation on the Front Lines,” “Mail Ballot Rejection Policies,” “Addressing Insider Threats and Protecting Election Officials,” “Election Accuracy: Going on the Offensive,” and “Voter Identity Verification: Balancing Access and Integrity.” ⁵

Affiliations

As of 2025, the Certificate in Election Administration program was listed as an official affiliate of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, an election and polling statistics center housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MEDSL’s research areas tend to favor a left-leaning narrative on election policy, focusing on subjects such as “mail-in balloting,” “same-day registration,” and “redistricting.” ^{2 3}

Faculty

As of 2025, Lawrence “Larry” R. Jacobs was listed as the lead professor of the Certificate in Election Administration program. He was the founder, and as of 2025, is the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota. As of 2025, he published the book Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History. ⁶

As of 2025, several faculty members have roles in other major election administration groups. Adjunct Judd Choate was the former president of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) and had served on the Executive Committee of the Government Coordinating Council (GCC) created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Adjunct Jennifer Morrell was the CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group. Tammy Patrick was the CEO for programs at the Election Center and was the former senior advisor to the Elections Program at the Democracy Fund. Adjunct Regina Roberts was the voter education director for the Citizens Clean Elections Commission. Adjunct Maurice Turner was working as a “public interest technologist” and “cybersecurity expert” on the Global Public Policy Team of TikTok. ^{7 8 9 10}

Past faculty have had backgrounds in government and big tech, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Microsoft, and the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office being listed among their credentials. ¹¹