Resources

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 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.

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 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.

This report highlights key factors influencing poll worker recruitment and retention, including poll worker pay, implementation of partisan balance requirements, and harassment. It also offers potential strategies legislators can use to improvement address these factors and improvement poll worker recruitment and retention.

This report summarizes existing academic literature related to election official and poll worker recruitment, training, and retention. Authors discuss the demographic characteristics of the elections workforce, methods of selection, training programs and barriers to retaining elections workers.