Preparation Before Arriving at Your Polling Place
Voters who prepare before leaving home can move through a polling place more efficiently and with less close contact time. Reviewing your sample ballot in advance, confirming your polling location, and knowing roughly what time you plan to arrive all reduce the amount of time you spend in a shared indoor space.
Bringing your own pen for signing documents, wearing a well-fitting mask, and having hand sanitizer available before you enter and after you exit are practical steps that reduce contact points. Some polling places provide these items, but having your own means you do not need to depend on supplies that may be limited.
Managing Your Risk While at the Polling Place
Outdoor lines and well-ventilated spaces carry lower transmission risk than crowded indoor environments. If you are waiting outside, maintaining distance from others is straightforward. Indoor waiting areas require more deliberate attention to distance, particularly in facilities that were not designed with spacing in mind.
Touching shared surfaces like voting machines, pens, and sign-in sheets is an area where hand hygiene before and after matters. The risk from surface contact is lower than the risk from respiratory exposure, but combining good hand hygiene with mask use addresses both pathways without requiring significant additional effort.
Polling place workers are present for extended periods and face more cumulative exposure than individual voters. Supporting well-resourced polling operations, including adequate staffing so that individual workers can take breaks, benefits everyone who uses that location.
Considerations for Higher-Risk Voters
Voters with medical conditions that increase their COVID-19 risk have several options worth knowing about. Many jurisdictions expanded absentee and mail voting access for the 2020 election. Drive-through voting was available in some locations. Curbside voting accommodations exist in most states for voters who cannot easily enter a polling place.
Timing a visit to off-peak hours reduces both the time spent in shared spaces and the density of people encountered. Polling places are generally less crowded early in the morning on election day and during midday on days when early voting is available.
Steps After Returning Home
Washing hands after returning from any public space is a useful general practice, and applies here. Changing clothes is not necessary based on available guidance about transmission, but hand washing and avoiding touching your face before washing are consistent with the precautions that apply throughout any outing to a shared indoor environment.
Participating in elections is a civic function that communities benefit from broadly. The goal of transmission precautions is not to discourage participation but to give people the information they need to make thoughtful decisions about how to manage their own risk while doing so.