Are Cardboard Voting Booths Right for Your Polling Place?

By | August 17, 2012

If you’ve got an election coming up, choosing voting booths is one of your biggest decisions. Once you start shopping around, you’ll see that you’ve got lots of choices. You can opt for traditional curtained voting booths or more economical cardboard voting booths.

Traditional voting booths are nice-looking, steady and fully secure. People are used to seeing them at their local polling place. However, they’re also expensive, heavy, and bulky. Setting them up and tearing them down can easily be an entire afternoon’s work.

The advantage of cardboard voting booths is that they’re light and easy to assemble. You can move them anywhere and it takes just minutes to set up and tear down. They’re also inexpensive, saving your organization money.

Cardboard Voting Booths and Your Voters

Some organizations shy away from using cardboard voting booths because they’re afraid their voters won’t like them. They worry that they may look cheap or not fully protect their voters’ privacy. However, cardboard voting booths offer just as much privacy as traditional booths and although inexpensive, they’re made of sturdy corrugated cardboard.

The truth is that voters usually don’t notice the difference. They’ll be far more concerned with the overall organization of the polling place than the material used for the booths. As long as everything is well-prepared for them and the process is smooth, they’ll care little about the booths.

The Cardboard Option

To give you an idea of what cardboard voting booths offer, you can see several types here. You can see that they stand at an adult voter’s height and offer full protection on three sides so that no one can see them cast their ballot. Election equipment suppliers will usually custom-print a logo for you on the sides of the booths. After tearing down, booths are little larger than a pizza box, making storage easy.

Cardboard voting booths offer convenience, easy set-up and easy storage at a very low price. They look fine and offer complete security for your voters. But ultimately, it’s up to you to decide the best option for your polling place. Give it careful consideration because it makes a huge difference for your budget and labor resources.