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The group ranked 50 states based on more than 15 criteria, including wait times, lost votes and problems with absentee and provisional ballots, and the order often confounds the conventional wisdom.

In 2010, for instance, Mississippi ranked last overall. But it was preceded by two surprises: New York and California.

"Poor Southern states perform well, and they perform badly," said Heather K. Gerken, a law professor at Yale and a Pew adviser. "Rich New England states perform well and badly — mostly badly."

A main aim of the exercise, which grew out of Professor's Gerken's 2009 book, "The Democracy Index," was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said.

"Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings," she said. "But it also produces professional peer pressure."

The project includes an interactive tool that allows rankings by individual criteria or clusters of them.

Some states, for instance, lost very few votes thanks to shortcomings in voting technology and voter confusion, with the best 10 reporting failure rates of 0.5 percent or less in 2008. In West Virginia, by contrast, the rate was 3.2 percent.

Natalie Tennant, West Virginia's secretary of state, said that she was not happy with that result and that she would look hard at Pew's data and methodology. But she added that "2012 went really well, even with Sandy," referring to the hurricane that disrupted early voting in the last election. "We were humming."

"You're only as good as your next election," she said.

The Pew study is based on data from the 2008 and 2010 elections, the most recent for which comprehensive data were available.

The study also found wide variation in how easy registering to vote can be. North Dakota does not even require it, and Alabama and Kansas reported rejecting less than 0.05 percent of registration applications in 2008. But Pennsylvania and Indiana each rejected more than half of the registration applications they received in 2010.

On election day, the voting experience can also vary. The 10 states with the shortest waiting times to vote in 2008 averaged six minutes, the study found. In South Carolina, the wait was more than an hour.

The shift to voting by mail, which now accounts for some 20 percent of all ballots cast, tends to eliminate lines. But it has also produced new problems, especially in places where mail voting has soared because the state does not require an excuse or a new ballot request for each election. Arizona and California, where voting by mail is commonplace, had among the highest rates of problems with voter registration and absentee ballots.

In 2010, California rejected absentee ballots 0.7 percent of the time, a higher rate than any other state.

Dean C. Logan, the registrar for Los Angeles County, said the rate was partly a byproduct of the popularity of voting by mail in California and partly a function of how the state defines rejected ballots. Its definition includes ballots that voters requested but that the Postal Service returned to election officials as undeliverable.

"Voter behavior is changing and evolving," Mr. Logan added. Young people do not sign their names as consistently as older ones, he said, and mail delivery is becoming less reliable.

He also cautioned that statewide results can mask the fact that "the elections process is extremely decentralized."

Colorado, where some 70 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail in 2012, rejected absentee ballots 0.4 percent of the time in 2010.

Pam Anderson, the clerk of Jefferson County, Colo., defended that rejection rate. "It's not 10 percent and it's not zero," she said. "We do a very rigorous signature verification process."