Building a Durable Emergency Plan: Continuity and Operational Readiness for Elections

Hosted by the Election Security Exchange and the Partnership for Elections & Emergency Response

Your election office has a plan for election day. Does it have one for the emergency that lands on top of it?

A storm, a power outage, an incident that pulls in partners your office has never worked with before: every election can have a hazard that shows up uninvited. The offices that handle it well are not improvising at the moment. They built the relationships and the response plan long before they needed them.

The Election Security Exchange partners with PEER (Partnership for Elections & Emergency Response). PEER is releasing a new resource, The CORE Playbook: Continuity and Operational Readiness for Elections, a new framework built with input from both election officials and emergency managers. CORE is not a COOP plan. It is a framework for building the relationships, checklists and plans that make your office ready before an emergency hits, and it is designed to stay evergreen as your risks and partners change.

Already have a plan? CORE helps you stress-test it. Starting from zero? We’ll send you home with five simple suggested steps you can take this week, drawn straight from the Exchange’s own working group guide, It Starts with a Team.

Join the Election Security Exchange on Aug. 26 at 3:00 p.m. ET as PEER introduces the CORE Playbook, alongside election and emergency management professionals who helped build it.

We’ll cover how to:

• Build a coordinated incident response structure with clear roles, responsibilities and decision-makers
• Map who calls who, for what and when, and how information moves between election and emergency management partners
• Set a planning calendar tied to your election cycle, not just election day
• Stress-test your plan through exercises so gaps show up in a drill, not a real incident
• Start with five simple suggested steps this week if your office does not have a COOP plan or emergency response working group yet

Featured Panelists

• Casandra Hockenberry | PEER (Partnership for Elections & Emergency Response)
• Alex Jadrich | Senior Emergency Management Specialist, Denver Colorado Office of Emergency Management
• Scott Iles, CERA | Chief Safety & Security Officer, Charleston County (SC) Board of Voter Registration and Elections