What is this resource?
Effective Design for the Administration of Federal Elections is a blueprint for election officials and partners responsible for creating clear, understandable, and accessible communication materials for voters. Grounded in information design best practices, it contains guidance for designing:
- Printed Voter Information Materials
- Online Voter Information Materials
- Polling Place Materials
- Ballots
- Mail Voting Materials
- Post-Election Materials
This Second Edition (2026) modernizes and expands upon the best practices in the original 2007 version.
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The Role of Design in Election Materials
Information design is the process of communicating information in a clear, engaging, accessible, and usable manner. Information design principles include:
- Knowing your audience;
- Using plain language;
- Using hierarchy and structure to organize content; and
- Using typography, imagery, and color consistently.
Design that focuses on usability, clarity, and accuracy can be the difference between successful communication and confusion.
Effective Design for the Administration of Federal Elections, Second Edition, applies these design principles to election materials.
Election officials are encouraged to use these best practices, which are informed by extensive design expertise and conversations with civic design experts, election official feedback, research, testing, and evaluation. While we hope all the tips included in Effective Design for the Administration of Federal Elections are helpful, the good news is that even implementing one or two at a time will be impactful. You don’t have to take an all-or-nothing approach to improving election materials design.
If you’d like to focus on a particular area, each of the six modules included in Effective Design can stand alone. Want to work on ballot design? Everything you need is in Module 4. Want to know how to handle post-election materials, like audit or observer information? That’s Module 6.
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Additional Design Resources from the EAC
- Voter Education Design Toolkit: A toolkit and template resources on creating effective communication materials using the bite-snack-meal framework. Includes a best practices guide for voter education materials and editable content for 4 common voter education topics.
- Communicating Election and Post-Election Processes Toolkit: A toolkit and template resources to create educational materials about pre- and post-election processes that observers and the public can understand.
- Election Official Social Media Toolkit: A toolkit with over 150 customizable images accompanied by alt text, sample posts, and quick tips.
- Election Facts Label Toolkit: A toolkit providing a visually appealing and straightforward way to share accurate election information with voters.