Plan Together, Respond Together: Build Your Elections and Emergency Management Playbook

Election officials and emergency managers often meet for the first time in the middle of an incident. A polling place floods. A bomb threat clears a building. The power drops at central count an hour after polls close. By then the relationship is being built under pressure, and the clock is already running. We hosted a conversation introducing the CORE Playbook: Continuity and Operational Readiness for Elections, a free, joint framework developed by Advance Elections, the Denver Elections Division, the Denver Office of Emergency Management, Local Policy Lab, the Partnership for Elections and Emergency Response and Ready for Tuesday. The playbook does not replace anything you already have. Your continuity of operations plan, your emergency operations plan, your security procedures and your state's statutory requirements all stay exactly where they are. What has usually been missing is the connective tissue between them. CORE is a framework for the working relationship that makes those separate plans function together when an incident crosses agency lines. The session was about strengthening that partnership, not adding another binder to the shelf. We started with how to find your counterpart. Emergency management might be an OEM, a public safety department, a sheriff's office or one person handling it alongside three other jobs. Election administration varies just as much. From there we walked through why you plan for consequences instead of causes, since a relocation plan works whether the trigger is a flood, a fire or a failed generator. We built out a communications map covering who calls whom, how fast, who speaks publicly and what happens when the primary channel goes down. We showed how incident action planning ties existing plans, partners and deadlines into one shared operating picture. And we demonstrated two interactive calculators that turn an election date into a working timeline, with weekend and federal holiday conflicts flagged. We asked people to bring a specific problem from their last cycle, and to attend with their counterpart from the other side of the partnership. Explore the playbook: electionsemergencyplaybook.com