Prompts in Practice: Knowing the Ingredients for a Great Prompt

Breaking down the key ingredients of prompt design

Last week, election officials who represent large jurisdictions around the country gathered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdiction’s 2025 Summer Convening. A big thank you to Carolina Lopez, PLEJ’s executive director, for putting together and hosting another excellent gathering.

A friend and supporter of the AI & Elections Clinic, Microsoft’s Ethan Chumley, spoke alongside Jennifer Morrell, the chief executive officer of The Elections Group.

During the presentation, Chumley reiterated a point he made on our first AI & Elections Clinic webinar about how to prompt AI tools.

He shared that the quality of your prompt determines the quality of the output. Great prompts have four key pieces:

• Goal: What you want the AI to produce

• Context: Relevant background information

• Source: Where the AI tool should look for necessary information (e.g. a document, URL)

• Expectations: Specific requirements for the output (e.g. tone, format, length)

Prompts in Practice

Use Case/Purpose

Creating a summary of existing documentation and state materials pertaining to in-person voting options that can be understood more quickly by voters

Source

AI Recipe Book from The Elections Group (Bot Appétit!)

AI Tool Used

Google Gemini

Prompt

Please produce a clear and concise summary of Arizona’s official early voting procedures, drawing only from the Arizona Secretary of State’s webpage at https://azsos.gov/elections/about-elections/elections-procedures/early-voting-procedures. The goal is to provide an overview that captures the main rules, timelines, and processes for ballot-by-mail, in-person early voting, emergency voting, and special election boards. The audience may not have time to read the full page but still needs accurate and reliable information. Please use a professional, neutral tone, keep the length to around 500 words or less, and format the response with clear headings and bullet points for readability.

Output

AI Use Safety Signal

🟢 Green (Go)

This use case is a productivity task – the AI supports research, drafting, or design work while leaving the final judgment to you. Because outputs can be reviewed and verified before use, the risks are low. Always check accuracy, adapt language, and confirm compliance before sharing externally.