gratitude and advocacy
How can local leaders build powerful relationships with election administrators that support implementation while enforcing accountability?
At the recent 100% Democracy Research and Design Symposium, our co-hosts from the League of Women Voters of the United States talked about a tension their local affiliates face in developing their relationships with local election officials.
Local LWV affiliates are often on the frontlines of crucial local voting rights issues. They do amazing work all across the country to surface concerns in the community about unfair practices and hold local election officials accountable in the courts and the press.
But it is not strategic for LWV affiliates to have an exclusively or even mostly adversarial relationship with local election officials. Local election officials have extraordinarily difficult jobs and significant discretion about how to implement both good and bad laws. Their ability to execute and their decisions about how to implement the law can have massive implications for voter inclusion. A huge part of any movement for 100% voter participation involves supporting local election officials in executing their jobs well and using their discretion to include more voters.
Gratitude is an enormously powerful tool local LWV affiliates and other advocacy groups can use to balance accountability work with more supportive actions. But it can be hard to find the right moment and right tools to say thank you to our local election officials.
At our research and design symposium, organizations present worked with LWV in exploring several options for supporting local leaders in recognizing the contributions of local election officials and thanking them for their service to our communities.
Days of action: Several organizations have hosted distributed “Election Hero Day” or “Thank Election Heroes Day” actions over the last couple of years to encourage both social media and in-real-life celebrations of local election officials.
Official proclamations: Governors, Secretaries of State, and Mayors from diverse regional and political backgrounds put out proclamations in 2020 to celebrate the work of local election officials and poll workers. At a time when anything about elections is perceived as partisan, there is still some space for shared appreciation of the service of the people making our elections possible. Check out this video of Larry Hogan delivering one such proclamation in 2020!
Advocate for adequate funding of local election officials: Local election officials often don't have enough resources to pursue their mission of including 100% of voters to the fullest extent. League affiliates can both help address that issue and build their relationship with their local election officials by showing up and speaking out in support of increased funding for election administration at strategic times both at the state and federal levels.
Posters and thank you cards: A growing number of templates exist for posters and thank you cards specifically designed to thank local election officials and poll workers. These can bring a spirit of gratitude into the high stress work of running an election and the best ones can create a keepsake or momento that can brighten a local election office (and reinforce a relationship with local partners) in the long run. It really is *so much fun* to visit and celebrate local election officials in this way!
As LWV and other local partners move forward, and as the 3rd Annual Election Hero Day approaches on November 7, 2022 I’m so excited to keep working with LWV and the rest of the 100% Democracy community keep exploring how we best use gratitude as a tool to include everyone in our democracy.
Please reach out if YOU have suggestions or ideas for how to expand this delightful and growing area of work that LWV and so many other partners are doing to say THANK YOU to the heroes who make our elections possible.
Best,
Sam
