When there are big changes in elections, they sometimes come with years of careful planning, public discussion, and voter outreach. And then there is this year. Faced with the challenge of running safe elections in the uncertainty of a pandemic, election officials are pulling off a move to running a vote-by-mail election in a few months – or even a few weeks.
Scaling up voting by mail is a work in progress for everyone. For some election offices, moving to voting by mail is a big change for voters and election procedures. For others, the challenge is handling an increased use of an already-popular voting option.
Our mission is to help election officials make it easier for everyone to vote. We worked to design all the materials for voting at home so it’s easy and accurate to cast a mail-in ballot.
Now we are gathering great samples from elections offices around the county and we’re turning them into templates for envelopes, instructional inserts, forms, and voter outreach, so you don’t have to start from a blank page.
We are also writing guides to some of the difficult design problems like making sure that your ballot packages have everything the US Postal Service needs to get them to voters and back to your office.
You can find them all on our tool kit of designs for scaling up vote by mail.
And we’re here to help, with advice or a quick review as you work.
The first step in moving to an all-mail election or significantly increasing the use of vote-at-home ballots is to consider all the decisions and policies that will define the election. The answers to these 7 questions will help you assess the work ahead of you:
Scaling Up in 2020: CCD’s guide to the decisions and policies needed to support the implementation of mail-in ballots for the 2020 elections. Includes the starting questions.
Tool kit of designs for scaling up vote by mail: Templates for envelopes, instructional inserts, forms, and voter outreach
In addition to the vote-by-mail tool kit, you might find these resources on our site helpful:
And all the wonderful resources from our friends at the Elections Assistance Commission and Vote at Home Institute
This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.