Voter guide best practices

Voters need personalized information that is well organized and cleanly presented in an easy-to-read format.

Voters — especially new voters — want information that will help them:

• Understand their choices about how, when, and where to vote
• Learn about what is on the ballot for each election, so they can make decisions
• Identify nonpartisan, official information they can trust

New and infrequent voters don’t know where to start

Voter guides to an election include a sample ballot, candidate information, and information about measures, but new, inexperienced, and infrequent voters have to make huge inferences to map that information to their very basic who, why, and what questions.

Voters want a roadmap to the booklet and the elections process

In all of our research, participants wanted, liked, and used a table of contents when one was available. In the sample ballot prototype, the table of contents acted as a roadmap to help them understand the scope of the information in the booklet.

The civic literacy gap: voters need more than even the best guide can deliver

Even with a simplified guide, successful voter participation still depends heavily on civic literacy and understanding the basic concepts in an election. Participant after participant in both rounds of research stumbled over aspects of elections from terminology to a basic understanding of the process.

Our research identified three main practices for improving voter information

1. Use of plain language can’t be overemphasized
2. Good layout and thoughtful visual presentation are important for comprehension
3. Voter guides are an important civic literacy tool

We conducted this research for the League of Women Voters of California in collaboration with the Future of California Elections. This project is supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.

This project included several phases of qualitative research. Two rounds of research sessions with voters and interviews with stakeholders across the state provided a strong research base for our recommendations.

We collected and analyzed guides from all 58 counties for the June 2014 Primary Election to get a sense of the range of information already available and how it is presented to voters in California.

• Short research sessions were conducted with 53 people, collecting their preferences for what types of information they wanted and what channels and formats worked best for them. These interviews took place in Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Modesto.
  
• A prototype voter guide was designed and presented in 45 research sessions in which voters were asked to find answers to their questions about elections and talk about the experience of using the guide. These sessions took place in Los Angeles County, Modesto, and Berkeley. Participants included new citizens, people with low literacy, people with disabilities, and people who spoke Spanish and Chinese.