highest Quality Voter Registration Program
A large independent analysis of voter registration efforts during the 2020 election released recently found that out of 77 organizations and programs that collected 10 million registration cards, The Outreach Team’s program had the highest metrics in all fields.
We collected the 2nd most voter registration cards of any program with 58,000 forms collected across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan.
Our rate of successful registrations - the applications we turned in who made it onto the rolls - was higher than just about any other scaled program.
And the nearly 34,000 of our registrants who voted was more than any of the other 77 field programs evaluated.
All told, for every registration form collected, our program was 20% more likely to add an actual voter than the next best program, and we drove that quality while still collecting the most voter registration cards.
Thanks to our staff!
At all levels, our amazing staff were the keys to our success. We hired the best people who were really committed to running the best campaigns focused on entering communities respectfully, helping people become civically engaged and leaving communities better than we started. Despite the onset of the pandemic, we paid people well and supported everyone on our staff with healthcare access and unlimited PTO. We invested in local people and worked with them to develop them into really phenomenal community organizers. We pulled all of this off by respecting our staff and our communities, and by never losing sight of the fact that political participation is fundamental.
Here’s a story about how we ran the best voter registration program in the country.
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According to the independent analysis report, about four in five of the people who registered to vote through the programs they tracked actually voted. One state stood out from the pack, though: Wisconsin. In Wisconsin that number was closer to 90%. It was the best rate - by a lot - of any of the big-state programs.
Our firm ran the biggest voter registration program in Wisconsin (we collected 3 of every 4 forms in the state) and then helped turn out a lot of those same voters through door-to-door and phone outreach.
We aren’t new to voter registration forms. We have checked the integrity of more than a million of them through our back-end quality control program for close to a hundred partner groups across the country since 2017. And we aren’t new to voter registration campaigns: we have run lots of voter registration campaigns in the past. But we had never run voter registration campaigns in a pandemic.
We spent two and a half months working with an enormous coalition of organizers, activists, funders, lawyers, epidemiologists, dogs, cats, and countless other Zoom boxes to design a health and safety plan that everyone agreed was our best bet to do the essential work of registering voters as safely as possible for everyone involved.
We reinvented our canvassing model on the fly to an all-remote hiring and training process. We adjusted to constantly and rapidly evolving circumstances, and we stood up teams in four more critical battleground states as we went: Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Wisconsin remained our laboratory for figuring out how to make it all work, though. We built a six-city campaign that overcame a glitchy app, some of the most draconian registration laws in the country, and a global pandemic to register 30,000 people to vote in a state that wound up decided at the Presidential level by 20,000. We registered thousands more new voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and then we brought over 8,000 more Georgians into the mix. When the Senate run-offs happened, we found nearly 9,000 additional people statewide who hadn’t voted in the Presidential election. All told, by the time the last registration deadline came and went we had collected over 58,000 registrations as one of the largest programs in the field.
There are far too many barriers between the people and the ballot box to expect everyone to engage and make their voices heard if they don’t have some help. That’s the power of a well-run voter registration program. And we need to ensure that voter registration campaigns continue to operate at a high level if we’re going to preserve our democracy.
We are so proud of our staff for being the best at what they do and driving quality at every turn. Congratulations to every Outreach Team member who registered voters in 2020 - you made all the difference.