Work the polls
Counties are chronically short of poll workers, both parties need them, and the work is paid. Training, sometimes also paid depending on your county, is required before each election.
Your county
Ask a public question
Florida's public records law is unusually strong. The barrier is knowing the form — so tell us what you want to know, and we'll build a correctly-formed Chapter 119 request you can send yourself.
About working the polls
What the job actually is. Poll workers run the polling place on election day: setting up equipment before doors open, checking voters in, issuing ballots, helping people who have questions or need assistance, and closing the site down at the end of the night. Roles differ — a clerk runs the location, inspectors handle check-in and ballots.
It's a full day. You start before polls open and finish after they close, so expect a long one rather than a shift you can fit around other plans.
Who can do it. Reported requirements are US citizenship, Florida residency, and being at least 16 — 18 to serve as an inspector. Training is required beforehand.
Why it counts as common ground. Every county needs workers and both parties need them staffed. It's the least contested civic job in the state.
Specifics vary by county and the details above still need checking against current law. Your county's elections office is the authority.
About public records requests
What Chapter 119 is. Florida's public records law — among the broadest in the country, and backed by a right of access written into the state constitution (Art. I, §24). The working assumption is that government records belong to the public unless a specific exemption says otherwise.
How fast they must answer. Chapter 119 sets no express deadline. An agency gets a reasonable time to locate the records, review them, and redact anything exempt — how long that is depends on how big and scattered the request is.
Questions people actually ask:
- How much did the city spend on outside legal counsel in 2025, and which firms were paid?
- The current contract between the school district and its transportation vendor.
- Emails between the county commission and a named developer about a specific project, over a specific few months.
- Inspection reports for a particular building or facility.
What makes a request work. Name the records you want, not the conclusion you're after — a date range and a department turn a vague ask into one a clerk can actually search for.
Draft a records request
This helps the people who answer it, too
A records request lands on the desk of a public employee — a clerk, a records custodian, an administrator. Around 23 million Americans work for federal, state and local government, and almost none of them are politicians (BLS: roughly 15.2M local, 5.5M state, 2.7M federal).
They are already of the people, by the people, and for the people. The goal here is not to cut them back or replace them. Their experience is the asset — decades of knowing how things actually work — and we want it kept and put to better use.
A clear request is a kindness. A vague one can cost someone hours of guessing at what you meant and searching the wrong systems. Naming the record, the office and the dates turns that into a search they can run. That's the whole reason this page exists: not to generate more mail, but to make the mail that gets sent easier to answer.
Florida's public records law is broad. The hard part is knowing the form — so you say what you want to know, and we put it in the shape an agency expects.
Not sure what to ask for? Pick what you care about:
It's free, open source, and made by people who live here. Four kinds of help, and only one of them is code.
If you work in a records office or run elections
You're the most useful person who could read this. This tool exists to make the mail you receive easier to answer — so tell us what phrasing actually works in your system, and what we get wrong. We're not trying to reduce or replace public employees; the premise is that better inbound requests free up your time for the work only you can do.
Spotted something wrong?
County offices move and websites get reorganised. If a link is dead or a detail is out of date, tell us the county and what you found and we'll fix it. Every fact here carries its source and the date it was checked.
Used it for real?
Tell us what happened — how long the reply took, whether the office understood the request, what caused friction. Real outcomes beat any amount of internal review.
Write code?
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
No account needed for any of it. Open an issue on GitHub, or email bill@unhackdemocracy.us directly — you're welcome to leave out which office you work for.