Poll greeting matters
Poll greeting matters most for candidates down the ballot. Many voters decide on their U.S. Senate candidate long before they get to the polls, and they are less likely to know the judicial, sheriff and commission candidates. For those voters, the card your greeter hands them will be the only thing they learn about you before they vote.
Poll greeting also reaches only people who are voting. No wasted effort. Every person who walks past your greeter is a certain voter.
Campaigns that do this well plan it ahead of time.
- They choose their sites carefully.
- They keep track of who is covering each shift.
- They prepare their greeters to make a strong last impression.
Know the rules at each site
Your greeters work outside the buffer zone, in the area the county sets aside for campaigning. The county sets the distance, between 25 and 50 feet from the entrance, so it is not the same at every site. Ask your county board of elections where the line falls at the sites you plan to cover, and have your greeters check with the officials on site before they set up.
Choosing your sites
Most campaigns don't have enough volunteers to cover every site for every hour. Decide which sites matter most before you start recruiting. Early voting and Election Day call for different approaches.
During early voting, a registered voter can vote at any early voting site in their county. The precincts around a site won't necessarily tell you who will vote there. You can see where different types of voters are voting though once early voting is underway if you have a data platform that provides that insight. With this information, you can adjust your priority locations on a daily basis.
On Election Day, each voter must vote at the polling place for their own precinct. That lets you estimate who will come to each site. Rank your Election Day sites by how many of your target voters live in each precinct and how often those voters have voted in past elections. A small precinct where your voters reliably vote can be worth more than a large precinct where they rarely vote.
I built the Poll-Greeting Scheduler to rank sites this way. It already has every polling place in North Carolina loaded. It ranks Election Day sites by the expected turnout of the voters you target, based on party, age, and other criteria you choose. It ranks early voting sites by the number of people voting there, updated each morning.
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Setting up shifts
Early voting runs from Thursday, October 15 through 3 p.m. on Saturday, October 31, and Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Counties set their own early voting hours, and sites in the same county can keep different hours on different days. Weekend hours are often shorter. On Election Day, every polling place is open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Shifts of two to three hours are easier to fill than long ones. Fill the busiest times first: the first hours of the morning, lunchtime, and late afternoon. The first and last days of early voting are usually busy, and so is the morning of Election Day.
Tracking all of this in a spreadsheet gets hard quickly. A county with 20 early voting sites open for 17 days, with three shifts a day, has more than a thousand shifts, and many of them have different hours. The Poll-Greeting Scheduler loads each site's early voting hours from the state's data and creates all the shifts at once.
Recruiting greeters
Give volunteers one link they can open on a phone to choose a site and a time. Share it by email, text, and social media, and print a QR code for the table at your events.
When someone signs up, send a confirmation with the site address and shift time. The day before the shift, send a reminder with directions and a list of what to bring. Make it easy to cancel, too. A volunteer who can't come should be able to release the shift in one step, so you hear about the opening while there's still time to fill it.
The campaignmanager.us scheduler sends the confirmations and reminders automatically. Greeters sign up on any phone without an app or a login, and they can cancel from the email.
What a good greeter does
Give your greeters one short script and let them say it the same way all day. "Hi, I'm volunteering for Jane Smith. She's running for district court. Would you like a card?" Name the office. A voter often knows a district court seat is on the ballot without knowing who is running for it.
Hold the card out with the candidate's name facing the voter. A voter who takes the card and reads it on the way inside is the whole point of the shift.
Keep the greeting to a few seconds. The voter is on the way to vote, not into a conversation. A greeter who stops to argue with one voter loses the ten voters behind them.
Stand where a voter sees you before they reach the door, and leave them a clear path. Voters who feel crowded drop their eyes and keep walking.
Let anyone who says no go by without another word. A greeter who pushes costs you the vote they were trying to win.
Put your most confident greeters at your best sites during the busiest hours. One good volunteer at a high-traffic site over the lunch rush reaches more voters than a reluctant one reaches in a day.
What to hand out
Don't write a new message for the polls. Use the one your campaign has been running all year, cut down to what a voter can read while walking.
Your name goes largest. The office goes next, almost as large. A voter who gives the card a one-second glance should still come away with your name and the office you are seeking. That is the card's whole job, and everything else on it is a bonus.
Under those, put three things: three policies, three qualities, three reasons to vote for you. Use whichever three your campaign has been saying all along. A slogan or tagline can sit at the bottom if there is room for it.
Leave white space. A crowded card reads as a wall of text and goes into a pocket unread. If you want to say more, make the card bigger instead of making the type smaller.
You can hand out what you already printed. A palm card, a flyer, or a door hanger you made for canvassing works at the polls. Nothing about poll greeting requires its own piece, so a tight budget or a short calendar is no reason to skip it.
Some campaigns reach early voting with nothing printed at all. Those campaigns still have a good option: have your greeters hold a yard sign. A friendly "Hello, thank you for voting" from a volunteer standing beside your name leaves a voter with something. Where you have two volunteers at a site, one holds the sign and the other hands out cards.
Preparing your greeters
Greeters need palm cards, a sample ballot if your campaign or party has one, water, a folding chair, and clothes for the weather. Late October in North Carolina can be warm at midday and cold by evening.
Your greeters will stand near volunteers from other campaigns. Most of the time, everyone gets along. If an argument starts, your greeter should stay calm, walk away, and report anything serious to the election officials at the site. Some county parties train greeters to handle these situations. Make sure someone from your campaign answers the phone during every hour the polls are open.
Keeping track once voting starts
Your schedule will change once voting starts. Volunteers get sick or have conflicts, and some sites are busier than you expected. Check every day which of the coming shifts are fully covered, partly covered, or empty. Move greeters from slow sites to busy ones, and send your signup link again to fill the empty shifts at your most important sites.
The Poll-Greeting Scheduler's coverage view shows each site and day, colored by whether the shifts are full, partly filled, or empty. It also lists each site's rank, so you can see which gaps to fill first.
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Early voting starts October 15. If you start this week, you have enough time to choose your sites, set up your shifts, and recruit your greeters.
I built the Poll-Greeting Scheduler for this work. It covers every polling place in North Carolina, for early voting and Election Day. You pay once for the whole election: $99 for a single county, $299 for two to four counties. You can sign up here, or email me with questions about your race.