Last month at the meeting of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) here in Washington, DC EAC rolled out the initial phase of our #BeReady16 campaign. #BeReady16 is an effort by the EAC to provide a broad level of information and support to election officials in the areas that are most pressing during this presidential election year.
In early 2015, we - the EAC Commissioners - began a listening tour. We attended state election conferences, national conferences, and visited state and local offices. The listening tour enabled EAC to identify initial areas of focus for the #BeReady16 campaign.
These areas of focus include:
- Contingency planning & emergency preparedness
- Vote-by-mail & USPS
- Managing election technology (maintaining old systems & purchasing new tech.
- Improving accessibility for voters with disabilities
As part of the rollout at NASED the EAC showed a short clip from our webisode "How to make sure your vote-by-mail ballot counts." The full webisode is available at EAC.gov on the #BeReady16 page. It provides a wealth of ideas and best practices for election officials on working with the USPS and important vote-by-mail deadlines. In addition, EAC created votebymail.gov. This site provides a one stop shop for election officials to find all info they need regarding vote-by-mail and the USPS. EAC continues to work with its partners at FVAP and USPS to add to this site to ensure that the information is complete, accurate and useable.
Next month EAC will rollout updated pollworker recruitment and training information and hold a webisode on that same topic. The goal of the update to the original EAC research is to identify innovative approaches to recruitment, retention and training of pollworkers with a focus toward recruiting younger pollworkers and the use of social media as a recruitment tool.
As we move forward with #BeReady16 we encourage all election officials, advocates or voters to reach out to us with suggestions, best practices or other areas of focus.