Election Day
Election Day Activities
The goal is to turnout GOP voters to get Republicans elected. Planning for Election Day is essential to accomplish this goal. Outside Polls: Recruit volunteers (greeters) to work during the busiest times to pass out slate cards and talk to voters for 2 hour shifts during the busiest time: 7-9am, 11am-1pm, 4-8pm. Call several weeks before Election Day to schedule and again the day before to remind them. Inside Polls: Recruit volunteers (poll watchers or checkers) who must be registered voters residing inAllegheny
County. They work from 7am to 8pm. You must provide them with county poll watcher certificates and a list of registered voters. Instruct poll checkers to check off voters as they come in to vote.
Phone Callers: Recruit phone callers to arrive at the polls about mid-afternoon to pickup the list of voters and supporters who have not yet voted. Callers then go to phone bank and call those on list who have not yet voted. Election Law: Be familiar with Election Law and report anything that appears to be irregular. Tally the Vote: Collect the vote totals from all the polls and review the results. Evaluate your Election Day Activities: What did you do well? What were the problems? What could you do better?
-Beatrice Browand, Grassroots Coordinator of
Upper St. Clair Republican Committee
Post-Election Activities
Win or lose, the time after the election should be spent productively to build morale and gather information. Election workers should be thanked with phone calls, e-mail messages, or cards. Throwing a holiday party for committee members and volunteers is also a nice gesture of gratitude if you can afford it. Gatherings such as these also help to build friendship and bonding among the volunteers.
It is also a good idea to have a de-briefing session with the election volunteers or to send out a short questionnaire to the grassroots volunteers to ask the following questions:
- What did we do well?
- What do we need to improve?
- Any new ideas or suggestions for the future?
- Were any problems or irregularities observed at the polls?
Compile all the suggestions and ideas into a “Lessons Learned” list and circulate the list to the all the volunteers. Also, file the “Lessons Learned” list in a place where you can find it, and then review it with committee members and volunteers at a meeting before the next election. Local committee chairs should obtain the online election results from the county website and compile a results table on a spreadsheet showing how every candidate did in every voting district. This spreadsheet should be distributed to every volunteer so they can review and compare results to evaluate their performance.
Pre-Election Newsletters
One of the most useful tasks that a local committee can do before an election is to mail a newsletter about the candidates running in the election to the Republican base. Newsletters are especially important during local elections because local candidates are not well-known.
The newsletter should consist of short biographical sketches with objectives for each endorsed candidate and descriptions of any referendum items. You should give short, simple reasons why the voter should select the endorsed candidates. The newsletter should also have a page with a slate card displaying a summary of all the offices on the ballot and the names of the endorsed candidates. Other items to include in the newsletter are an invitation to become a committee member, an appeal for a donation, and the local committee’s contact information including a web address.
The newsletter can be printed on regular 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper using a word processing program such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat. The length should be no more than 2 or 3 physical sheets of paper, printed on both sides. The pages can be formatted so that the newsletter is folded in half and reads like a book. The least expensive copy services are usually those at Office Max or Office Depot. Be sure to ask beforehand for a special discount given for larger jobs.
For the Primary Election, the newsletter should be sent to all Republican super voters in your local district. In the General Election, you can send newsletters to your GOP base as well as to Indpendents and Democrats in selected swing districts. Be sure to mail only to regular voters in order to save resources.
Local committees can use the RCAC bulk mail account to save about 12 cents per item on postage. Using bulk mail requires pre-sorting the items by zip code, pre-loading newsletters into postal trays, filling out a form, and delivering everything to the U.S. Postal Service bulk mail facility in the North Side on California Avenue.
The newsletters should be mailed about 10 days before the election. Timing is important because if you mail too early, the information will be lost or forgotten before election. And if you mail 7 or less days before the election, you take the risk of the newsletters arriving too late.