Voter educators will have to find and secure venues for a wide variety of activities. Doing this introduces a number of issues related to the costs and administration of their programmes.
Cascade training, press conferences, coalition meetings for a voter education consortium, voter education workshops, election briefings, planning sessions, community gatherings, televised debates or discussions, music festivals, drama rehearsals and productions, and mock elections are just some of the kinds of meetings or events likely to take place as part of a voter education programme. And educators will be competing for meeting space with every other participant in the election, including political parties, election administrators, NGOs, and the press.
It is often surprising how difficult it becomes to obtain public venues - to identify them, book them, obtain them at low cost, and keep them available when the programme is still in development but may require them at some point in the future. It is also likely to be a challenge to find a space appropriate to the needs of a particular activity. A conference, role-playing exercise, televised event, dramatic production, or planning session are likely to require different types of spaces. For some, theatre style seating may be fine. For others, educators may need to move furniture around to encourage participation. Or an interesting backdrop, open floor space, lots of table space for coallating materials, or multiple power outlets may be required.
Even those countries that have large tourist and convention industries may have venue problems outside tourist resorts in more isolated or less congenial parts of the country. There may even be competition in resort areas if elections are being conducted at times when conventions are in town. So early access to a reliable team of people who can be creative in their search for suitable venues is essential.
Amongst the less obvious venues, and certainly outside the normal experience of professional travel agents, are church and religious assemblies and retreat centres, camps, educational institutions, fairgrounds, and sports fields. Where venues are needed with overnight accommodation, they are even more difficult to find unless it is possible to arrange hospitality with local people.
Such alternative sites, however, are often difficult to reserve from a distance, and payment, where required, is often on a cash basis. So having local contacts and having to carry large amounts of money may conflict with the centralised and administratively convenient systems that national voter education organisations and election authorities often put in place.
Hotels and commercial conference centres become the preferred educational venues, rather than the public spaces that will ensure the events operate from a community base and with community support. Unless it is possible to persuade the owners of such venues to donate their use, voter education programme costs can balloon and discourage organizers from conducting public events.
