Resources

This resource, published by the U.S. Alliance for Elections Excellence in collaboration with the Center for Civic Design and the Elections Group, provides workbooks and templates for election officials to revise or build poll worker manuals from scratch. This toolkit is for anyone writing or updating their jurisdiction’s poll worker manuals.

This page contains materials created by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to support election officials in recruiting, training and retaining poll workers. It contains powerpoint templates, customizable graphics, social media templates, and sample press releases for recruiting poll workers as well as links to EAC publications on the topic such as as the 2026 report "Election Worker Recruitment, Training, Retention, and Evaluation."

This resource provides an online application template that election officials can use for recruiting prospective poll workers and gathering their information and qualifications. It allows election administrators to effectively manage and track poll worker data, including availability, skills, and training.

This toolkit contains templates and guidance for election officials to create visual inventories of the supplies needed at stations. This resource is designed to support poll workers by helping them easily identify, find, and organize supplies when setting up a polling place.

The EAC Clearinghouse Resources in Poll Workers are designed to help election officials recruit, train, and retain temporary or seasonal election workers. Topics include fostering long-term commitment, adult learning, and managing challenging interactions, among others.

The EAC Learning Lab is the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s online, on-demand training platform for state and local election officials. Training modules, including poll worker modules, are free and focus on various election administration topics such as accessibility, communication, and voting systems, among others.

This resource, published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, provides election officials with practical ways to improve poll worker retention.

This resource contains powerpoint templates for creating bite-sized checklists for election day tasks. The checklists can be printed so that poll workers can carry the checklists as they move around the polling place.

This report aims to support election officials in strengthening poll worker programs and recruitment. It outlines state legal frameworks for serving as a poll worker, including voter status and residency, age requirements, and compensation. It also highlights state, local, and political party strategies for improving poll worker recruitment, such as community partnerships, targeted outreach, and improved training programs.

In this paper, Michael Greenberger examines the effect of poll worker recruitment policies, local demographics and political characteristics on poll worker recruitment, finding that less restrictive poll worker requirements can ease recruitment efforts. However, underlying demographics and income levels also help identify where recruitment may be difficult. He claims that the U.S. Election Assistance Commissions report on poll worker recruitment is incomplete, particularly for states formerly covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

This June 2023 report outlines best practices for improving poll worker recruitment. It identifies barriers such as overly restrictive residency and age requirements, heavy reliance on political parties for hiring, and insufficient compensation and training standards. The report recommends concrete reforms to help election administrators build a more diverse and sufficient poll worker workforce.

This study aims to understand poll worker incentives and motivations. Authors analyze original data from a 2015 survey of poll workers during the 2015 British general election. They found that a range of relationships exist between individuals' decision to serve as a poll worker and various incentives, as well as poll workers' socio-economic, social capital, and satisfaction profiles.