Infographics help voters prep for California primary

Kammi Foote, Clerk-Recorder-Registrar for Inyo County, California, has recently gained recognition for helping to inform voters beyond the boundaries of her own county.

Using the Voter Outreach Graphics tool, Kammi created an infographic to help No Party Preference voters prepare for the June 7 California primary. Spreading quickly across social media, her infographic reached countless voters.

In California, about a quarter of all voters — over 4 million people — are registered as No Party Preference, or NPP. To receive a ballot that includes presidential candidates, these voters have to proactively request one. And even then, party policies this year allowed NPP voters to participate only in the Democratic, American Independent, and Libertarian primaries — and not the Republican, Green, or Peace & Freedom ones.

Feel confused? You’re not the only one.

In fact, news outlets in Sacramento County were reporting as early as February that the election office in Sacramento was receiving hundreds of phone call inquiries from NPP voters who wanted to know why their mail ballot didn’t include the the parties and candidates they expected.

To help avoid such confusion in Inyo County, Kammi wanted a way to clarify the primary process for NPP voters, so she turned to Canva, the program behind the Voter Outreach Graphics tool, to send the message.

“We hoped that by sharing information via a plain language infographic,” Kammi explains, “accurate data would reach more NPP voters quickly so they had adequate time to request a ballot with their preferred presidential candidates.”

Her plan worked. The infographic she created was shared on Facebook and Twitter, and it reached much farther than she anticipated. “The response was overwhelmingly positive and the graphic was shared across the state of California,” she says.

in three columns, infographic explains who can vote for which political party

Kammi’s infographic

Before using ElectionTools.org, Kammi had never made an infographic. But once she got started, she saw their value immediately.

“It is important to provide information to voters in ways that are easily understood,” Kammi stresses. “It is also crucial that our message extends to a wide audience. There are billions of people using social media on a daily basis. If election officials want to disseminate useful information to the greatest number of people, infographics are an obvious choice.”

Do you have a voter communication challenge that might be addressed with an infographic? If so, practice your communication and design skills with our Voter Outreach Graphics.