2023 - Winner for Best Practices in Recruiting, Retaining, and Training Poll Workers

The Salt Lake County Clerk's Office developed a dynamic relational database for organizing, assigning, and communicating with poll workers. This database, built in Airtable, utilizes filters and color-coded tags to track work history, expertise areas, availability, relationships to other poll workers, and more. The Clerk's in-person voting team utilizes ArcGIS surveys to capture availability and other information from potential workers, inputting this data directly into the database. Poll workers can be filtered into groups for a specific assignment, and these groups can drag and drop into the custom, dynamic Microsoft Word mail merge email or text templates designed to integrate with this system. The Clerk's Office can send mass communications that are automatically tailored to each worker's assignment details. The database has made it easier to assign poll workers to vote centers in their local community and identify the most engaged and experienced poll workers for promotion to team leaders. This new structured and efficient approach has resulted in improved election worker retention and a greater capacity to focus on in-depth training.