Vote centers and polling places: survival guide
Flashcards to address exceptional situations.
No matter how much you plan, unexpected events or questions arise. These flashcards can help election workers know how to respond to the unexpected.
Questions and answers get divided into categories: voters and workers, technology, and operations. You can add more categories as you see fit. Use these cards during training to help election workers prepare for Election Day. They are great for scenario training.
About the templates
Download the survival guide powerpoint template
After downloading and opening the zip file, you’ll find a PowerPoint template with example content divided into 3 categories: voters and workers, technology, and operations.
About the survival guide
The survival guide was built to grow over time. The templates include example content that you can modify or add to. You can also transfer content from your troubleshooting, “What ifs,” or FAQs from a training manual to the survival guide format. Think about whether there are more categories you want to include.
Resources to help create the survival guide
- Field Guide Vol. 4 Effective poll worker materials
- Field Guide Vol. 2 Writing instructions voters understand
- Using shades of black. In the other two tools in this toolkit, we use color to show the role. To avoid confusion, we won’t use color here. Instead we’ll use shades of gray to indicate the different categories of the survival guide. Here are 3 different shades to get you started. You can add or modify the categories for your own use in the master slides. Notice that these are the same shades as the border of each individual card.
- Contact and other important information. Use the second page of the survival guide to include any contact information or other details that your election workers need to know in a flash.
- Category. Match the borders of each card to the category it belongs. Also write the category as the top heading.
- State the problem as a heading. Make this big and concise so election workers don’t have to search to find what they need.
- Action steps. Include action steps to tell election workers how to respond to the situation.
Packaging the survival guide
We created the survival guide so that each flash card is a quarter of a letter page size. When you print, make sure to print so that four slides print on one page. For binding, you have choices, including staples, binding tape, spirals, or another method. If you think of these as flashcards, you may want to print them on card stock and stack them together with a simple rubber band.