“So many problems that can result on Election Day are a result of inaccurate and incomplete information on the voter lists, which can lead to more provisional ballots because voters are in the wrong precinct because officials didn’t have the correct information,” he said. “Officials don’t get information about a move unless a voter affirmatively does something about their voter registration, and that is usually in the 30 days before a presidential election. In between elections, officials are sending mail to some people who are no longer there.”

Pew has been working with some states to promote online voter registration and sharing of lists among government agencies for that purpose. Mr. Becker said that this year a number of states working with his group — Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Utah and Virginia, among others — are going to reach out by mail for the first time to eligible but unregistered voters.

“Republicans are very much in favor of cleaning up and maintaining voter lists and Democrats want to make sure access is available, and we believe there are tools that address both,” he said.

One set of recommendations was released on Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Called “Better Designs, Better Elections,” the report estimates that in the 2008 and 2010 general elections combined, as many as 400,000 people had absentee or provisional ballots rejected because they made technical mistakes on the forms or the envelopes. It adds that the loss appears to be greatest among low-income and minority groups as well as among the elderly and disabled.

Lawrence Norden, a co-author of the study and deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, said that in Texas machines in 50 counties are set up so that if a voter marks a straight party option and also pulls the levers for the candidates, that vote gets annulled. Research has shown that blacks and Latinos tend to do this more often than others, leading Democrats there to try to change the design but to little avail.

Looking broadly at such design flaws, Mr. Norden said he doubted that they were set up to suppress voting and were most likely the result of error. But because of mutual suspicion between the parties, they have been hard to fix. His co-author, Whitney Quesenbery, a design expert, said the private sector has learned a great deal about the significance of design — fonts, shadings, colorings, instructions — but election systems have been very slow to adopt them.