Vote-at-home envelopes and information
Our work on designing the envelopes for voting at home started in California in 2017. We worked with the California Secretary of State’s office, county election offices, and national experts to design new vote-by-mail packages to support the Voter’s Choice Act in which voters have the option to return their ballots by mail or dropbox or vote in person at a vote center.
Now we are working with counties and states across the country to adapt this simple, usable design into a flexible national model.
Designing vote at home envelopes
A workbook with templates for envelopes and other materials, free to use.
- Two envelope sizes: 6 x 9 and 10.5 x 4.5
- Outgoing and return envelope
- USPS ready
- English-only and bilingual layouts
- Updated with colors for 2020
- InDesign files ready to adapt to your state
A toolkit of designs for scaling-up vote by mail
More free forms, envelopes, and resources for designing a vote-by-mail program
Vote at home webinars
Three free 1-hour webinars to help you improve voter engagement, and reduce election-related costs through vote at home programs, presented in collaboration with the National Vote At Home Institute Center for Tech and Civic Life
- Implementing envelope best practices
- Preparing helpful supplementary materials
- Integrating low-cost tracking and reporting tools
Why vote at home?
Whether it’s called vote-at-home, absentee voting, or vote-by-mail, the ballot packages include the envelopes addressed to the voter, ballot return envelopes, forms for voter signatures, and instructions.
A successful design will make it easier for voters, affordable and robust for election administrators, and accurate for the US Postal Service. The design:
- Makes it easier for voters to recognize and return their ballot accurately
- Supports bilingual ballots to meet Voting Rights Act language access requirements
- Improves election administration by reducing errors and make it easier to process vote-by-mail ballots.
- Creates recognizable consistency to support statewide voter education campaigns.
- Offers flexible templates so envelopes can be customized for local information and procedures.
- Supports accurate handling and delivery of ballots sent through the US Postal Service (USPS).
The design system is a layout that can adapt to different sizes and types of envelopes with a logical arrangement of the content elements that can be adapted to different envelope systems.
Outgoing envelopes
The blue bar, county seal, election mail logo, and the words “Official ballot” identify the outgoing envelopes. Counties can put contact information and basic instructions on the back, with room for two languages.
Return envelopes
The return envelopes include instructions, the voter’s declaration and signature form, and a checklist, in the new purple color for 2020.
This layout, for a 6×9″ envelope, will also fit two languages for bilingual counties.
The visual anchor of the design is a color bar on the envelopes that help voters and election administrators identify different types of ballot envelopes easily. The colors are also helpful for the USPS because they help distinguish envelopes on their way to voters from those returning to the elections office. The color wraps around the edge of the envelope so it is visible in a stack of mailers making them easy to identify at the postal facility.