9 minute read
Rural Places
Rural
Rural areas feature a low density of people and a high concentration of natural or cultivated open space. In many instances, rural voters must travel longer distances to vote, as poll locations are increasingly centralized into fewer locations, often within larger campus-style school and regional government complexes.
Summary Election officials serving rural areas may need to utilize surface parking lots and other adjacent open spaces to facilitate some or all voting activities. General spatial and communication strategies for rural environments are offered below, with more specific guidance for improving access, queuing, and health and comfort detailed in the pages that follow.
General Spatial Strategies Reconfigure surface parking lots, ballfields, lawns, or other open spaces 1 adjacent to polling locations to better accommodate drive-thru or in- person voting.
2 Utilize internal or external sidewalks for in-person voter queuing; where possible utilize building breezeways, porticos, awnings or other architectural features that provide weather protection.
Manage pedestrian and vehicular flow so that queuing voters are 3 provided dedicated and physically separate space from non-voting passersby.
Provide clear wayfinding and informational signage that directs voters 4 to polling locations.
Key Steps • Install temporary traffic barriers and signs along approach roads and within parking lots. • Empower municipal staff and/or poll workers to install, manage, and monitor barricades / queuing activity.
• Provide comfort amenities such as seating, shade, water etc. as needed for in-person voting. • Maintain access for emergency vehicles, school buses, shuttle vehicles, and designate priority parking spaces for voters with disabilities. • Ensure design and operational guidance complies with overall local, state, and national health and election laws and standards. 2
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Planning + Communications •Create partnerships between Boards of Election and relevant Municipal / County / State agencies to develop site plan criteria that includes sanitation, disabled voter access, weather protection, and signage for voters, poll workers, and elections observers. •Create an expansive communication plan to broadly publicize any/all pandemic related restrictions and resulting polling protocols and election-day access, queuing, and health and comfort amenities offered to voters. • Partner with cultural groups, nonpartisan civic associations, schools, etc. to promote options and logistics, and to support general election activities.
Improving Access
Develop Poll Location Access Enhancement Plans Because some or all voting activities may take place outdoors, previous voter access plans may need to be altered to account for and coordinate changes to roadways, parking lots, and other means of access. If your jurisdiction has chosen to facilitate outdoor voting, election officals should partner with the local or county public works department and / or poll location facility staff (schools, fire departments, city hall, libraries etc.) to develop a COVID-19 access plan. At a minimum, each plan should include the following four steps.
Analyze Adjacent Land Uses and Roads 1 Contact local stakeholders – community organizations, residents, businesses, and other geographically relevant institutions – to identify any key obstacles or issues that may impact the design or programming of outdoor voting activities. The role any/all adjacent roads play in the wider transportation network should also be considered, although this is less of an issue in rural environments. On-site parking lots, playgrounds, ball fields, or other public spaces may be used as needed to minimize coordination among multiple government agencies and jurisdictions, e.g. Township and State.
2 Accommodate All The Ways People May Arrive Access plans in rural areas may be the simplest, but they should still consider all the ways people may arrive and respond accordingly by highlighting available resources or enhancing opportunities for people to access the polling location safely. In rural areas this may may primarily include motor vehicles, but should also account for those who walk, wheel, bicycle, scoot, and even skate along bike trails or local/regional walking paths, take public transportation, or use ride share/ride hail services, or carpool.Temporary access and safety improvements may be as simple as employing crossing guards during all polling hours, or partnering with a local school bus contractor to offer rides for seniors or other discrete populations of voters. Additionally, clearly designating pick-up/drop-off areas for taxi service, ride hail providers, and access-a-ride / shuttle services will help voters keep their own cars at home. Finally, the addition of temporary wayfinding to/from bus stops, adjacent intersections, and bike trails should be provided, especially if typical voter access points have shifted in response to the pandemic.
A Lewis County (Washington) ballot drop box. Photo: Joe Mabel
3 Ensure ADA accessibility Temporary roadway or parking lot reconfigurations must be ADA accessible. This requirement impacts everything from building entrances to available sidewalk widths, to drop-off locations, sidewalk ramps, and outdoor voter booths. If necessary, designate secondary ADA-compliant routes or outdoor areas dedicated voters who require universally accessible voter booths.
Monitor All Points and Means of Access 4 Allocate municipal staff and/or poll workers to monitor polling location access points so that any issues can be flagged and resolved as soon as possible.
The following two pages include a sample access plan, detailing typical elements as well as those that might be enhanced under a streets for voting plan.
Access Improvement Plan This sample plan identifies the location of existing poll access features relevant to in-person and drive-thru voting, as well as voter experience enhancements. Note, most of the existing and proposed enhancements are concentrated internal to the voting site, a nod to the to the self-contained nature of rural environments where most adjacent roadways are not likely to be used for much other than driving. Select improvements are visualized in more detail on the following page.
Minor Farm Road
Major Road
Existing Access Access Enhancements See detail on Following Page
Secondary Road
Access Enhancements Temporarily enhancing access to/from and around polling locations will assure voters that their needs have been considered and that their health and welllness matter as much as their vote. Wayfinding + Informational 5 Signs Clear wayfinding and informational signs will help drivers and pedestrians navigate an unfamiliar set up within
Pick-Up / Drop-Off Zone 2 Pick-up / drop-off zones should be designated within close proximity to the building entrance/ voting queue and may be utilized by access-a-ride vans, taxis, ride hail companies, voting shuttles, carpools etc. what otherwise may be a famiiar setting.
Drive-Thru Voting 1 Streets, drive aisles, and parking lots may be reconfigured to enable drivethru voting, ballot drop-off, and passenger pick-up / dropoff. Clear wayfinding and information signage should be placed at decision points and placed to help people walking, cycling, wheeling, and driving to safely access and participate in the election.
Queuing Under normal circumstances, parking lots at rural poll locations are used for just that; voters park on-site and enter the queue to cast their vote inside. However, at this moment in time, the use of drive-thru or curbside voting offers an appealing, physically distant, and weather-proof option for election officials and voters alike. However, it’s important to consider the potential negative impacts of a vehicular-based voting system, especially for the 11 million American households that cannot afford or choose not to own motor vehicles.
Queuing cars are spatially inefficient when compared to people on foot or in wheelchairs. Indeed, voters arriving by car at peak voting hours may easily overwhelm a site’s queuing capacity. The average sedan is 15 feet in length so leaving just 10 feet between vehicles (front and back) yields a total of 35 feet of linear space per voting vehicle. Thus, what requires 600 linear feet for 100 voters on foot requires as much as 2500 linear feet, or 2/3rds of a mile in length, for the same number of people voting by car.
Actively planning for and managing vehicular queues will result in a better experience for both poll workers and voters alike, leading to less disruption to other roadway users, and mitigate unintentional social and economic impacts. This is especially true in locations that can offer both in-person voting as well as drivethru voting options over the voting period.
The diagrams at right depict 50 queued people, either voting in-person only, drive-thru only, or within a hybrid scenario where both options would be available. The third and final option, if feasible, would likely present the best option, so long as wait time information was provided in real-time so that voters could make decisions about what works best for them. 27 Option 1 In-Person Voting Only 50 Queued People | 300 Linear Feet
Option 3 In-Person + Drive-Thru Voting 30 Queued Vehicles | 20 Queued People 1,170 linear feet
Queuing Queuing needs will vary across rural environments. Voter turnout and State/County/and Municipal regulations, combined with the fact that no single polling location, street, or neighborhood is like another will result in a wide variety of in-person voting conditions. Below are three recommendations for improving the queuing experience for voters.
1 Estimate Voter Turnout: Plan For The Most Estimate maximum turnout to determine potential spatial needs and plan accordingly. While scenario playing, identify queue overflow locations for walk/bike/drive-up voters on an individual voting site level and ensure enough poll workers exist to manage the maximum condition. Wherever possible, shrink the queue footprint through the utilization of available sidewalk, street, park, parking lot, playground, or other adjacent open spaces.
Allocate Queuing Activities to Maximize Safety and Comfort 2 Physically separate any /all parking or pick-up drop-off areas from voters queuing on foot; enhance with additional comfort/safety, including low-cost, removable surface markings or vertical materials to delineate physical distancing; sanitation and comfort stations (port-a-potties, chairs, shade/weather protection etc. and signs to delineate physical distancing; provide sanitation stations throughout the site (bathrooms, voting machines, etc.)
3 Assign ‘Polling Ambassadors’ a Clear Role in the Queue: Communication It’s not enough to station poll workers at the entrance of the polling location, ‘ambassadors’ should be tasked with working along the queue to answer questions, field concerns, issue sanitation protocols, and most importantly to communicate wait times. etc.
Lebanon, OH voters queue for the start of early voting. Photo: Dean Beeler
Health + Comfort
Summary Voting during a global pandemic mandates all local, county, and state health precautions must taken to limit the spread COVID-19. Sanitizer should be readily available; masks worn; physical distancing requirements made abundantly clear; and reporting/contract tracing practices operationalized should someone report symptons after they vote. Beyond safety, ensuring voters are not deterred by long queues will require a range of basic amenities, such as places to sit and rest, protection from the weather, access to water, bathrooms, and community-affirming entertainment such as music, poetry, and dance.
Finally, a key aspect of voting safely at this time is to identify which aspects of the voting process (e.g. registration, queuing, filing ballots, ballot drop-offs, etc.) may/shall be accommodated outside and which cannot. Beyond that, closely considering election day infrastructure needs for voters, poll workers, and election observers is paramount. The drawing at right depicts eight ways to facilitate safe, healthy, and comfortable voting.
Physical distancing markers Garbage can 2 Voter check-in / health information sign 3 Pop-up tent 4 Chair 5 Pick-up / drop-off zone 6 Recycling bins 7 Crossing guard 8 4
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