By Wendy Underhill

My colleagues and I have answered at least a dozen requests in the last week from citizens asking how to vote. Part of me wants to cheer for each person who calls—voting is core to democracy, after all—and part of me wants to ask, why me? 

Some of this crush of calls may be explained by presidential candidate Donald Trump. We’ve seen higher-than-average turnout for the Republican primaries so far this year, and Trump has claimed he’s expanding the electorate, or at least the Republican electorate.

I can’t speak to the correlation or causality of his campaign, but I can say that quite literally as I was typing this blog post, I had a call from an Indiana man saying he wanted to find out how to vote so he could do his part to keep Trump out of the White House. Other callers have been just as clearly thrilled to have Trump running.

What have these callers got in common, since it isn’t a political point of view? Most of our callers are new voters, and it makes sense that new voters need more support than old voters. 

In case your offices are also getting questions from constituents on how to vote, here are some good, generic answers:

• The canivote.org Web page, maintained by the National Association of Secretaries of State, helps voters throughout the nation figure out if they’re registered, and if not, how to get registered.
• Check out the Election Official & State Voter Information Directory, brought to us by the U.S. Vote Foundation, which connects people to local election officials who know best how to help a potential voter become an actual voter.
• And, if your callers prefer asking a national group, the help desk at the U.S. Vote Foundation will answer any election-related question from a prospective voter.

Then there’s the Voting Information Project, from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The goal of VIP is to “help voters find information about their elections through collaborative open-source tools.” When it gets closer to the general election, its Voting Information Tool will allow voters to enter an address and get the details they need to vote. Until then, VIP is at the heart of a national movement to make official voting information available to every voter where they are most likely to look for it: on their phones. VIP has widgets that can be embedded in any website or app, and the more the merrier.

As for NCSL, we’re glad to help on anything related to election policy. Early voting, voter ID, election technology and online voter registration are biggies. If you’ve read this far, you might even like to subscribe to our elections newsletter, The Canvass.  Here’s the most recent issue.

Wendy Underhill is in charge of NCSL’s Elections and Campaigns Program.

Email Wendy