Local election officials and how they interact with voters, candidates and sign carriers — it can all have a lot of influence on people’s confidence in elections. To help, the Election Assistance Commission — a small, independent federal agency — has established a YouTube channel with videos about that very topic, how to effectively communicate with people in what can be challenging situations. EAC Chairman Ben Hovland joins the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with more.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin  Local election officials and how they interact with voters, candidates, sign carriers — it can all have a lot of influence on people’s confidence in elections. To help, the Election Assistance Commission, a small independent federal agency, has established a YouTube channel with videos about that very topic, how to effectively communicate with people in what can be challenging situations. EAC chairman Ben Hovland joins me now with more on this program. Mr. Hovland, good to have you back.

Ben Hovland  Thanks, Tom. It’s great to be here.

Tom Temin  And we have an election coming up, and let’s face it, one side is going to say the other side did everything they could to suppress voters participation in this group or that group. The other side will say, well, that those folks all ginned up buckets of ballots that appeared mysteriously at midnight. You’ve got these horrible charges going back and forth. Is that part of the reason you’re trying to maybe calm the waters locally, so that people will have faith in what’s going on in their school cafeterias and auditoriums?

Ben Hovland  Yeah. Well, you know, I think campaigns and parties have their job, and Election Officials have a role as well. And that role for election officials, you know, is to be that trusted source of accurate information. And so part of our efforts have really been to support them and then support their efforts to communicate with voters, to share that trusted source information about how you participate, how you get registered, making sure your registration is up to date, and then really making a plan to vote, or thinking about how you can be vote ready. You know, are you going to vote by mail? Are you going to vote early in person? Are you going to vote on Election Day, depending on on what works best for you and what your jurisdiction allows?

Tom Temin  And what do you find is the person or the office, that, of local employees, that are in charge of elections? What I mean is a lot of people volunteer on Election Day, and they greet people, and they accept the ballot and put it in the box of the machine, and all these kinds of tasks that are only needed Election Day, so they use volunteers. But who’s in charge in general? What type of title throughout the year to make sure that it’s going to happen with the volunteers?

Ben Hovland  Well, one of the amazing things about, so you’re absolutely right. You know that person that that most people interact with on election day, those folks are poll workers, or they’re election judges, or it depends on, on what state, what their title is, but, but those are people from our community, people from your neighborhood, your friends, your neighbors, who generally get paid for that day, but are essentially volunteers and help conduct our elections. If you step back a level, those folks are trained by professional election administrators. Again, our elections are decentralized in this country, and so that’s run at the local level all across the country, but the person that holds that office may differ. So you have local boards of elections in some states. You have county clerks, municipal clerks, auditors, recorders. The exact title of where that office is held varies across the country, but at the end of the day, they’re all individuals who are professionals, and they’re committed to running our elections in a transparent way and following the law, and so when we think about the work that we’re doing at the EAC to support the folks and particularly around this effort, it’s really empowering them to make their voices a little louder and get the word out to the voters on how they can engage, how they can participate, how they can make their voices heard in November.

Tom Temin  And let’s talk about that video series for a minute. What are the types of things you’re dealing with? What is it you feel they need to know that they can learn from the EAC in this area of communications, because it’s no longer just TV, radio and the local weekly newspaper ad.

Ben Hovland  That’s right, you know, I think it’s a couple things. One, you know, there’s been a decent amount of turnover in the elections field, and so part of it is getting people who are new to the field or new to their role up to speed as quickly as possible. But frankly, there’s improvement for all of us on our communications and outreach. I think the increased attention to election administration the last several years, highlights an appetite by the public to understand the process and so thinking about that. But again, one of the main recommendations, is to think about ways to coordinate or partner with organizations, thinking about who other voices in your community can be. Again, I mentioned the list of folks who are those local election administrators across the country, but those aren’t always the loudest voices in our community. Those might not always be the place that people know to turn to, and so collaborating with the media, collaborating with other elected officials who maybe have larger platforms, are at least opportunities to drive people to that information, and then having, you know, solid messaging around those basic facts of what people are looking for. Again, you know, key figures, dates, times, when you can get registered, what that registration deadline is, where you can participate, how you can vote. Those are the things that Americans are interested in. And they need to get it from a trusted source, so that they aren’t seeing something incorrect on the internet.

Tom Temin  We are speaking with Ben Hovland. He is chairman of the Election Assistance Commission. And tell us how you went about scripting these things, and did you use external talents to voice them, and so forth? What was the process here?

Ben Hovland  I wanted to do it, but they told me that someone probably would do a better job. No, you know, again, I think all of these things at our agency are a collaborative effort. You know, we are an independent, bipartisan agency, so we’re getting feedback both across our agency and with stakeholders. And we also have a number of former local election officials on staff who help create a lot of our clearinghouse products which are really best practices in election administration, to help, again, support election officials across the country. And so it was really a group effort there to focus on those key priorities for voters and to provide resources that, again, help locals amplify their voice both. You know, there is the video series that we’ve been talking about, but we’ve also produced a number of toolkits, things like a voter education toolkit, a social media toolkit. Again, a lot of these are customizable graphics or posts to allow people to get that information out on different channels and meet voters where they are.

Tom Temin  But videos take scripts, and the scripts have to have a lot of specific information, but also have to be sayable in front of a camera, so it sounds natural and so on. How did you go about that? And who did you vet the information in the scripts with? Or is it intrinsic within the EAC? Tell us about the process of what happened before someone stood in front of a camera.

Ben Hovland  Yeah. So one of the things, I mean, again, I think with the communication series, there’s just tried and true best practices that we know from communications professionals, you know, folks that are on our team that focus on communications, again, blending that with experts and subject matter experts on elections, to take those two things together. One of the challenges in doing our work at the 50 state level is that each state has its own election laws, and there’s federal law. So that’s certainly an area that we specialize in and we can focus on. But if you go too far down, you know, you get into nuance. And so a lot of the work that we do is either at that 50 state level, and in this example, on communications, again, there are certainly best practices that are universal, as far as communicating with the public and messaging. But then there’s also, we did a series around accessibility. Again, the Americans with Disabilities Act applies all across the country, even if you run elections a little differently, those need to be accessible. And so we did a series that talked about making polling places accessible, making sure there’s sufficient parking, but also making sure that your communications are acceptable, your website, you know, other outreach is accessible. And so, you know, again, a lot of the way that we approach it is recognizing the areas that are applicable in the 50 state and then, or leading people to have options to customize that. And these are all supplemental. There’s also state training that goes on, either from from the chief election officials and states or state associations. And so we really look at this as a way to support those efforts or allow people to focus on their state specific work, and we can take care of those things that are applicable at the 50 state level.

Tom Temin  Well, did staff write all of the scripting for these or did you hire a contractor to do it and you vetted it? And did you have to hire a production company to make the videos? Because they look pretty slick from what I saw.

Ben Hovland  Well, thank you. Yeah, it’s usually a combination of all of the above. Again, it’s a process. But you know, in this case, you know, we’ve got communications professionals on contract, so there’s an element of that. But of course, you know, we’re also always reviewing that in house and using our in house talent to also contribute to that. So it’s really a group effort.

Tom Temin  All right, well, we’re doing this interview which people can’t see by Zoom. I’d say you’d probably be pretty good in the video, but then, you know, I’ve got a face for radio myself. Ben Hovland is chairman of the Election Assistance Commission. Thanks so much for joining me.

Ben Hovland  Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin  And we’ll post this interview along with a link to the video channel at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Subscribe to the Federal Drive, wherever you get your podcasts.

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