Campus Address Dropdown Menu
What is the dropdown menu?
The campus address dropdown menu helps students who wish to register with an on-campus address easily find the correct address to sign up for TurboVote and, if needed, to register to vote.
Here’s a GIF of how this feature functions on the page where students are asked for the address where they wish to register.
Students can select their residence hall from the dropdown, which pre-fills the correct address into the relevant fields. If applicable, they can enter their room number or box number, before hitting “Continue” to move to the next step of the TurboVote signup process. In situations where the local election official would like all on-campus students to use a single address (see Step #1 below), students would be provided with just one option in the dropdown, which we can label “On-Campus,” or something similar. Either way, the dropdown vastly simplifies the process for students who wish to register on campus. Students who are registering with a home or off-campus address can ignore the dropdown and type in their address as normal.
Note: The text directly above the dropdown is automatically activated with the dropdown menu, and cannot be edited. It reads, “If you want to register using a campus address, please select it from the box below:” However, the paragraph above this text is entirely customizable, in case you wish to provide additional instructions for your students. You can read more on the customizations page, or you can check out the customizations request form.
If you’d like to add this feature to your TurboVote site, please follow the instructions below.
Step 1: Determine the preferences of your local election official
Some election officials are strict about the addresses they’ll accept for voter registration. They may prefer that on-campus students all use a single, centralized campus address (which may or may not be the same as their mailing address), or that they each register using the physical address of their specific residence hall. The TurboVote team highly recommends coordinating with your local election official to determine acceptable registration addresses for students who live on campus before activating the dropdown menu. Someone at your institution may have been in touch with your local official about this question previously, so it may be worth asking folks on your team if they know the answer before reaching out to the official. If you don’t have contact information for your local election office, you can use this resource to find their contact info, or reach out to your Program Support contact at Democracy Works.
Step 2: Collect and format your campus address(es)
At this stage in the process, you’ll need to collect all the campus addresses you plan to add to the dropdown menu. If you don’t know the addresses, you may need to reach out to others on campus to get help collecting them. For instance, if the local official told you that students should register using the physical addresses of their residence halls, you may need to reach out to the housing folks on your campus to get a list of the physical addresses for each building.
Once you have the address(es), please format them in an Excel or Google Sheets file before sending them to your Program Support contact. The embedded file below shows the headers you should use. Each address should have its own row, and the address should be split between the columns as is appropriate.
For address elements that each student will need to customize, please use brackets to flag the need for personal information, like “Rm [Add Room #]” or “#[Add Campus Box #]”.
Here are the fields you should include:
display-name — This field appears in the dropdown menu but won’t appear as part of a student’s registration form. Think of this as the name of the address.
street — This field should contain the first line of the address, e.g. 1 Campus Ave.
apartment — This field should contain the second line of the address, if one is needed. Typically this is where elements that students need to customize are entered. We recommend keeping the final version of what will appear in the apartment field to 10 characters or less. While your instructions can be more than 10 characters long (e.g., Rm [Add Room Number]), the final version should ideally be just a few characters.
city — This field should contain the city line of the address.
state abbr. — This field should contain the relevant state abbreviation, e.g. NY or WV.
5-digit zip — This field should contain the 5 digit zip code for the address.
Step 3: Submit your formatted file to your Program Support contact
Once you have your address(es) formatted correctly, you can send them over to your Program Support contact at Democracy Works! If you aren’t sure who your contact is, feel free to email partnerships@democracy.works, and we will make sure you get connected to the right person.
Once we receive your address(es), we will review them and may contact you with questions or clarifications. Once the review stage is complete, we will process the addresses and get them live on your site within five business days.