Connecting voters with nonpartisan local voter guides for informed voting.
Can a voter guide help someone struggling to understand what will be on the ballot, and the implications of their choices, find the information they need to make a decision about how to vote?
The project combined the voter services and timely reminders of TurboVote with local voter guides from e.thePeople, for comprehensive voting support—from registration to casting a ballot. We helped guide this work with usability testing to learn what messages voters would open, and what links they would click on.
Then, in a deeper voter research project, we followed voters from around the country for the month around the election. Our goal was to understand the role that information like nonpartisan voter guides play in helping people prepare to vote or even motivate their participation.
We learned:
Usability testing early in the project helped improve the communications voters received to make sure that the messages would be understood, well-received, and opened by as many recipients as possible. We ran usability tests shortly before elections in Maryland and California, looking at the details of the messages Turbovote would send.
Here’s what we learned:
For this part of the project, we wanted to go deep and follow voters through the month before the election. Our study followed 52 voters from early October until just after the election. We wanted to learn what information voters want as they prepare to vote, how they want that information and where they actually find it, and what motivates them to take action.
We ended up with a rich collection of data covering voting habits, attitudes about elections and local politics, how they navigate their personal networks and news sources, and the barriers they experience.
Most of all, we learned how difficult it can be to find local election information, and how much people wanted a guide to help them understand what would be on their ballot and the choices they had available.
This “diary study” included multiple contacts through the 6 weeks of the study. We recruited 52 people in Maryland, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Washington State. Half were under 35, some were voting for the first time. We interacted with them by phone, email, and text message, starting with an interview about their voting experiences.
The project kicked off with messages from TurboVote and on other social media that said:
How are you getting ready for the elections? The folks over at the Center for Civic Design are running a research study and would love to learn about how you are getting informed for the elections. Whether you are sick of hearing about the elections or are excited to vote on Tuesday November 8th, they want to hear from you.
Once we had our voters selected, over the next 4 weeks, asked them to tell us about what they were seeing on social media, as they traveled around their neighborhood, in the news, or at the water cooler.
About 2 weeks before the election, we sent them links to an e.thePeople voter guide published in their local paper or on the League of Women Voters Vote411.org website.
And then it was Election Day. A few days later, we had the last conversation with them to get their insights into the election and their participation.