By Robin Carnahan and Erika Reinhardt
(Previously published on Electionline)
Time is every election official’s most precious resource right now. Fortunately, many officials are finding that even at this late date, they can still create significant efficiencies in their operations with quick technology fixes, allowing them to focus on their most pressing challenges.
U.S. Digital Response (USDR) provides vetted, pro bono technologists who can handle the heavy-lifting of designing and implementing low-risk solutions in a matter of days or weeks, for free. USDR’s Elections Team has already partnered with dozens of election officials to solve their needs, big and small, finding time-saving, sustainable, low-cost solutions.
“During an incredibly hectic time in election administration, it is helpful to have a partner like USDR who can bring additional capacity to election offices that are stretched to the limit.”
— Eric Fey, the Democratic Director of Elections for St. Louis County Election
Here are some of the problems and solutions USDR and election officials have partnered on to reduce election office workloads.
1. Automating Vote-By-Mail Application Intake
With an unprecedented number of vote-by-mail ballot requests this year, many local elections offices are burdened by the heavily-manual processing of ballot applications, adding to an already-heavy workload. Fortunately, many of the steps required to process each application can be rapidly automated.
USDR has built systems for multiple counties that automatically collect all of the applications sent in as email attachments, extract voter IDs from each document or look them up from other information on the form, and generate a daily summary report that can be easily reviewed and imported into the state voter registration system, saving each office multiple hours per day and ensuring none get lost or misplaced in email systems. USDR can design and integrate systems to fit your jurisdiction’s needs within days, since we leverage software tools that your office already uses. If your office has capacity to take this on independently and is on the Microsoft Suite, you can look into doing so yourself using Power Automate, a workflow automation tool that can connect between applications like Excel, OneDrive, and Outlook.
In addition, USDR is working with local jurisdictions to provide voters easy ways to generate their VBM application form online. Counties and states can take advantage of a full toolkit of resources from the Center for Civic Design for scaling up VBM operations, including ballot request forms, envelope designs, voter information and instructions, all based on best practices from across the country.
2. Answering Voter Questions Efficiently
With all the changes this year, many counties are receiving especially high volumes of voter questions ahead of the election. Meanwhile, elections offices all want to answer voter questions quickly, with less work, but frequently have only basic tools (e.g. a shared inbox) at their disposal to do so. Setting up support tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk or Front can enable your office to clearly assign different emails to different people, and ensure that every email gets answered as quickly, easily, and accurately as possible. Better still, a large portion of the incoming support volume can be eliminated altogether by making small, strategic updates to your webpage — highlighting answers in the contact flow that relate to the topic that a voter would otherwise write in about. The USDR team can help you solve both sides of this equation within days.
3. Managing Poll Workers
Election officials are looking for ways to effectively recruit, train, and manage new poll workers, since health concerns have reduced the availability of experienced poll workers. The USDR team is collaborating with counties to develop easy-to-use, lightweight digital tools for online, automated poll worker applications, communication, and management. These tools can help reduce the work required for election office staff to intake applications, assign poll workers to different locations and shifts, and communicate with poll workers.
4. Communicating with Voters
USDR partnered with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to launch a new local elections website template addressing many elections offices’ website wishlist: enabling them to manage all of their own content in WordPress, while using a clean design that’s easy for voters to navigate, and reducing the rate at which voters contact them with questions that should be answerable online. Inyo County, California just launched their new elections website using the template within a week of contacting USDR.
How USDR Can Help You
While there are many shared challenges across elections offices, the needs of each jurisdiction are unique. The USDR team is available to partner with any elections office (or non-partisan NGO supporting them) on any needs, and is working on a wide range of areas in addition to those described above. USDR’s elections program is led by a former Secretary of State and former Co-chair of both the Elections and Securities Committees of the National Association of Secretaries of State.
To learn more about any of the solutions described here, or any other needs your office has, you can explore our website, or reach out to us here. We look forward to supporting you.