HomeDevelop Educational Materials

Developing The Voters Guide and Educational Materials

Voters Guide

The LWVSA Voters Guide fulfills the League's long-standing commitment to promoting an active and informed electorate, providing voters with nonpartisan information they need to make informed choices at the ballot box.

The Voters Guide offers readers candidate responses — in their own words — to a set of issue and policy questions that all candidates in a given race have the opportunity to answer and submit for the public to see. Reviewing these responses helps voters assess which candidates most align with their own values and ideas of what good governance is.

Because LWVSA is a strictly nonpartisan organization, when the League team develops questions to ask the candidates for each contest, careful attention ensures all questions are relevant, neutral, and unbiased.

Each candidate receives a League request for their responses to these questions along with guidelines and a deadline, and all responses are printed exactly as they are received; no editing occurs.

The Voters Guide is typically distributed to all public libraries, the Bibliotechs, and many additional locations a week or two before Early Voting begins.

Informing Voters. Empowering People.

VOTE411

At VOTE411.org, an electronic, interactive version of the LWVSA Voters Guide is posted online as soon as it is complete, often a week or two earlier than the print version. The VOTE411 version generally includes responses to additional questions not included in the printed version due to cost constraints.

This award-winning website, created and maintained by the League of Women Voters of the United States Education Fund, invites voters to input the address where they are registered to vote, and a sample ballot appears that includes only the races they will be voting on. Voters can easily compare candidate responses side by side, and for each race on the ballot, voters can mark their choice of candidate. Voters can then download and print their selections to take to the polls and use as a guide.

Vote411 contains additional nuts and bolts information about voting in Texas, in both English and Spanish, as well as a poll locator.

Other Educational Materials

When the League of Women Voters was formed in 1920, its purpose was to prepare women to exercise their right to vote and become informed, effective participants in the democratic process. One hundred years later, the League of Women Voters of the San Antonio Area continues this mission of educating voters by creating print and digital educational materials that voters can use to learn about:
the importance of casting a ballot in every election, the particulars of voting in Texas, the rights Texans have at the ballot box, how to access information essential to vigorous participation in our democracy.

While the League provides digital voter education material on our website and social media, as well as in-person voter education power point presentations for organizations that request it, providing information on paper is critical to ensuring that voting information is available to voters in communities with limited access to the internet.

Visit our LWVSAA publications page to read or download any of our current brochures in English or Spanish for use in your organization or to share with family and friends.

Please contact us if you are interested in having the League give an informative presentation on voting for your organization.

Volunteer Opportunities

There are several ways volunteers can be involved in the production of the Voters Guide and other educational materials:

collaborate on development of questions for candidates
gather candidate contact information
follow up with candidates who don’t respond to initial contact
assist with production of Voters Guide on Vote411 (for tech savvy volunteers)
proofread drafts of Voters Guide
make follow-up calls to distribution sites to track numbers of guides taken and left behind
raise funds for printing costs
research, page layout, and graphic design for brochures
translate and proofread Spanish language materials
graphic design and campaign creation for social media accounts
research, development, graphic design for website content
creation of informational videos in English & Spanish
development and design of Powerpoint presentations

For more information about volunteering to help in the development of the Voters Guide or other educational materials, contact the League at voterservices@lwvsa.org or complete the form below:

Voter Services Volunteer Form