State-by-State Voting Guide Sheets

A major effort by the Columbia Votes team has produced a unique resource, completed yesterday: state-by-state guide sheets that walk students through the process of registering to vote and requesting a vote-by-mail ballot. Take a look and you will immediately appreciate that they are exactly what you need to know and do, step by step. There are links to FAQ answers for the questions that students tend to have along the way.

The guides are intended for students to use individually to become voters, but they are even more essential and unusual as a resource for peers and staff assisting students through the process. The guides start by telling you what documents you will need to have in hand, and then tell you how to navigate each state’s system so that you can get everything done at once. And they are grab-and-go: no personal data asked for, all information immediately available to you.

Election procedures may change rapidly between now and Nov. 3.  We’re resourced and committed to keeping these guide sheets up to date.  We’re also excited to partner with and support efforts at other schools that can make use of this resource.  To that end, we’ve provided a Customizable Link Page, a googledoc that you can copy and then customize for your own local purposes, and that has links in it to the 51 state guides.  Of course don’t copy the state guide sheets, because copies won’t receive our updates. To customize this resource for your school’s voting program, you should make your own copy of the Customizable Link Page. It is a google doc, so it’s easy to edit your copy. That page is a welcome to your students and to anyone who is helping students register and request vote-by-mail ballots. This is the place to list where to get help on your campus, and what kinds of help are available. Then, it has a link to each of the 51 State Guide Sheets. (Important: Do not make copies of the guide sheets! Use the existing links, because we will be updating these 51 State Guide Sheets as state procedures change between now and Nov 3.

There’s a page about the project in the Ask Every Student toolkit: https://www.studentvoting.org/toolkit/campus-created.