Building VoteAmerica’s Tools
Online voter registration has been available in various forms since 1996, and many sites still look and feel like they were designed then. As of 2020, there are 40 states that let voters register online, and a single national print form that works in (almost) all the others.¹
But after registering, if you want to vote by mail you need to request an absentee ballot through a byzantine process. You have to go to your local election official’s website, find the form on their website, download it, print it, fill it out by hand, and then sign and mail it in to their address. Some states don’t even put the forms online, you have to request them individually and are then legally barred from redistributing them to others.² And some state PDFs are so broken, they just are a crooked scan of a paper form,³ or include a corrupted font inside them that might not work on your computer.⁴
VoteAmerica has built a simple new tool to let voters request an absentee ballot to vote by mail online, in all 50 states and DC, by filling out a web page in about two minutes. It is designed with the voter experience, user accessibility and quick performance in mind. And it’s available today.
- In the 18 states where you can request your ballot online, we link directly to the official site, so you don’t have to Google for it. We’ll follow up with you to make sure you were able to fill it out easily (sometimes state websites go down, and many don’t work well on mobile phones).
- In the 32 states where you can email or fax your ballot request, and it’s legal in your jurisdiction, we’ll help you sign the form photographically and send it in immediately.
- In other states or counties which still have overly restrictive election laws, we will provide you a form to download with the information you entered. If you don’t have a printer at home, we can mail the form to you. And if you don’t have a stamp, we’ll include a pre-addressed and stamped envelope to send it in.
This is the most sophisticated voter registration and absentee ballot tool on the market, and it’s available for anyone to use, for free. Our code is public, and we are developing in the open for security and transparency.
We are also working on great new tools for the summer and fall, a polling place locator that also shows you ballot drop boxes and USPS mailboxes, and other election protection tools with our friends and allies. Our connected research program ensures that our messaging is tested by political science professors, and all of the results of our randomized controlled trials will be published in the open.
For partners who want to help their members get registered and an absentee ballot to vote by mail, you can embed our tools easily in your own websites, and a self-service admin lets you download your data matched to the TargetSmart and Alloy voter files.
We are excited to provide these tools for anyone to use, we are confident that they are the best available, and we hope that we are the last team who ever has to build them.
Check out the tools at VoteAmerica.com, and if you are interested in partnership oppportunities, please email me at josh@voteamerica.com. Developers may also be interested in our open API documentation and our publically available source code.
[1] New Hampshire, Wyoming and North Dakota are perpetual holdouts.
[2] Looking at you, South Carolina and Kentucky.
[3] I’d expect no less, Alabama.
[4] Come on, Georgia.
