Planning Desk, Week E-7: Emergency Planning in 60 Minutes

Some election offices have been planning for emergencies for years or decades. But if you haven’t yet started emergency planning, the 60-Minute Toolkit for Emergency Preparedness may be the resource that finally gets you going. 

The Toolkit and its companion Emergency Readiness Guide rest on three key pillars:

1. Devoting an hour to emergency planning can make a meaningful difference. The Guide provides bite-sized planning tasks. At the end of the first hour, you’ll have used the tools to create two critical resources for your plan.  
2. The cause of the crisis – whether it’s a natural disaster, civil disturbance, cyber attack, or other critical disruption – is less important for your office than the operational impact (which functions of your office are threatened or disrupted).
3. The difference between a small incident and a major crisis is mostly that crises disrupt multiple areas and functions. This can lead to panic, shutdown, or spinning your wheels. These tools help you sort the chaos into manageable chunks of work.

A Comprehensive Plan Built on Fives

The Toolkit includes five editable forms to build a comprehensive written emergency plan:

1. The Incident Assessment Checklist breaks out functional areas of your office (e.g., polling places, voting systems, poll workers, central facilities, IT, and emergency communications infrastructure) and has you assess the incident on the basis of how each of those functions was affected. This gives you confidence you’ve considered all potential impacts.
2. The Core Team Contact Sheet is where you list your go-to people – those who you need close because they’re effective, as well as those outside partners, like vendors, law enforcement, or emergency response whose advice and assistance are indispensable.
3. The Restoration of Operations Checklists are a set of forms, one for each of the functional divisions of your office, based on the Incident Assessment Checklist. You prefill each one, listing vulnerabilities, key staff, and outside contacts for that function along with backup resources and methods.   
4. The Support Team Contact List puts incident notification and assistance contact details at your fingertips so you can reach partners immediately when needed.
5. The Back-up Resources List identifies your emergency resources, supplies, and systems, where they are, and who manages them.

The Guide outlines five steps of effective incident response:

1. Assess the impact quickly and comprehensively.
   The Incident Assessment Checklist helps you complete this step.
2. Assemble your core team to determine incident response.
   Your Core Team Contact Sheet contains the contact information you need.
3. Assign responsibility for each affected function. 
   Use the Restoration of Operations Checklists to talk through each area with the person designated to oversee it. 
4. Restore function in each area of the office. 
   The assigned staffer will track and manage mitigation and restoration efforts using the Restoration Checklist, which should be prefilled with contact names from the Support Team Contact List and providers on the Back-up Resources List who can help restore systems or implement backups.
5. Review progress with the Core Team.
   Schedule progress reviews at appropriate intervals to ensure restoration is on track.

The Guide also provides exercises to help you understand the forms that will make up your comprehensive plan and fill them in with the relevant information for your jurisdiction. 

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The Planning Desk is a running timeline of key election security tasks. You can find prior editions in the newsletter archive.