About VoteAmerica

Annual reports

• 2022 Biannual Report

• 2020 Annual Report

Overview

• Goal: A healthy democracy.

• Strategy: Increasing voter turnout.

• Tactics: We build best-in-class software that anyone can embed on their website, and we run large-scale, information-based voter registration and mobilization campaigns. We’re goal-oriented and tactic-agnostic, so we adopt and abandon marketing channels based on how well they perform. Over the past few years we’ve used campus-based media, billboards and transit ads, warm and cold-sms messages, tiktok videos (specifically micro-influencers), and direct mail campaigns. We measure obsessively, often in partnership with prominent academic researchers, and we share our research with the larger community. We’ve run countless RCTs (randomized controlled trials), and we’ve also done observational analysis where appropriate. In 2024, we will be leaning heavily into same day registration awareness and mail-voting recruitment. Both of these tactics are under-invested, scalable, and have shown to produce significant increases in turnout.

Why do we do this work?

VoteAmerica is a democracy organization. Every day we ask ourselves what we can do, today, to ensure that US Democracy not only survives, but thrives, over the decades to come. Democracy is our north star; voter mobilization is the strategy that we’re pursuing; and everything below “voter mobilization” is an implementation detail. We’re goal-oriented and tactic-agnostic; we adopt and abandon tactics based on how effective they are, where effective is defined as the impact a specific tactic has on voter turnout.

The question that we ask ourselves, and the question that you should ask us, is why do we do this work? Why do we register voters, why do we mobilize voters, why does a diverse electorate matter, why does diverse representation matter, why are free and fair elections important? And the answer that we’ve come to, after long periods of soul searching, is that democracy is the system of governance under which the greatest number of people are likely to thrive. Democracy isn’t perfect, but it is better than all other alternatives. It’s also under attack, both within the US and globally.

The United States is a global model for democracy, but a democracy that is objectively in decline. 5 out of 9 supreme court justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. 50% of the Senate is currently elected by only 20% of the population. We spend more on elections than the entire rest of the world combined, yet we have consistently low voter turnout caused by decades of intentional voter suppression. It is harder to cast a ballot in the United States than in any other country with democratically elected leadership, and that is by design. 

VoteAmerica works to strengthen American democracy by removing barriers to voting. The end result is a larger and more diverse electorate – one that is better prepared to hold lawmakers accountable. We have a three prong approach.

• First, we build easy-to-use software that helps people navigate needlessly complicated voting processes, and we give this software away to any mission aligned organization that wants to increase turnout. 

• Second, we run large-scale voter registration and mobilization campaigns, and we specifically target young voters, people of color, and unmarried women. We’re goal-oriented and tactic-agnostic, which means we’ll abandon any tactic that stops producing results.

• Third, we engage in impact litigation against states that pass voter suppression laws. We recently won lawsuits against Kansas and Georgia, and we’re gearing up to sue Texas again. 

The 2024 election is shaping up to be a referendum on democracy itself. It’s more important than ever to invest in programs that work, and what VoteAmerica does works. Our tactics are battle tested, and they scale with capital, not labor. We launched in November 2019 with $4 million seed funding, and quickly scaled to 30 full-time hires, all with extensive experience in mobilization and campaigning. With 2024 coming up quickly, we are again raising a round of funding, so that we can replicate our earlier success.

What mobilization tactics do we use?

In our years of voter engagement work, we’ve seen that the three most effective ways to get voters to polls are 1) telling people when the election is, 2) removing barriers to voting, and 3) creating a culture of voting. Every program that VoteAmerica rolls out is built around these three objectives — and as a goal-oriented, tactic-agnostic organization, we make sure to stay nimble enough to update our programming to keep with the times. If a strategy isn’t working, we don’t hesitate to close up shop — and when something proves successful, we make sure to scale it as broadly as possible, in order to amplify the impact.

Campus advertising

There are just under 20 million students enrolled in colleges and universities nationwide. This is a racially and economically diverse pool of potential voters, and one that is easily mobilized. They don’t need to be convinced to vote, they need to be taught how to vote: where they need to go, what they need to bring, and exactly when the election is. Investing in young voters also pays dividends for decades: studies show that voting is habit forming. If you can get a young person to vote in 3 consecutive elections, they will become lifelong voters. This is a smart economic investment in our democracy. Debra Cleaver, our CEO, has been running large-scale campus mobilization programs since 2018. Most campus mobilization work involves field organizers, meaning students who are trained to register voters. VoteAmerica takes a different approach: we run multi-channel marketing campaigns in campus newspapers, transit ads and billboards that are physically located on campuses, email blasts that are sent from the school paper directly to the students, 11x17 posters that are hung on campus, etc. We choose campus media, as opposed to channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, because studies show that students trust campus media significantly more than they trust other marketing channels. 

In 2018, these full page ads, when run for a single week, produced a 2 percent point increase in turnout. In 2019, we experimented with an 8 week program; this produced an 8 percent point increase in turnout. In 2020 we purchased all available campus inventory on 241 campuses, including 94 out of 107 HBCUs reaching 3,081,832 students. This was the largest campus mobilization program of 2020. In 2022, we ran the program across 52 campuses and reached 1,331,825 students. 

This program works and it scales. When we run this program, we win. But when this program isn’t funded, we are leaving votes on the table. 

Billboards and other outdoor advertising

One of the biggest barriers to voting is also one of the easiest to solve: many people simply do not know when the election is taking place. We’ve found that billboards, transit ads, and other outdoor advertising allow us to fully saturate areas with a simple “‘VOTE ON [DATE]”’ message — and in many of the neighborhoods that need voter outreach the most, they’re also surprisingly affordable. Even better, outdoor advertising has a multiplier effect. Studies have shown that people who see billboard or transit ads are more likely to respond to later outreach, including via SMS and mail. Every billboard strengthens our more direct engagement strategies.

In 2022, we placed hundreds of billboards across Ohio and Wisconsin, targeting areas with historically low voter turnout. In Wisconsin, our campaign had 119 million estimated impressions, and in Ohio had 23 million estimated impressions. The billboards established excitement over the upcoming election (“there will be record high turnout”), informed about the date of the election, and importantly, let voters know that they could register to vote at the polls (same day registrations). Same day registration significantly increases turnout, but only if voters know it exists. Unsurprisingly, states with same day registration lack marketing budgets to spread the word. This is a gap VoteAmerica fills.

Direct mail

Direct mail is one of the oldest outreach strategies there is — and it’s easy to see why it’s so popular. It’s targeted, hard to ignore, and it gets people’s attention. For the 2022 campaign, we relied on direct mail to connect with voters. One week before Election Day 2022, we sent approximately 100,000 postcards to households in four counties across Nevada, Michigan, California, and Maryland as part of a randomized control trial. In addition to providing the dates for early voting and Election Day, these postcards contained basic information about same day voter registration. Preliminary analysis indicates that the postcards boosted turnout in line with expectations for a nonpartisan mailing.

Time and again, VoteAmerica has proven that we know how to get voters to the polls. From often overlooked state and local elections to heavily hyped presidential races, we’ve shown that our methods work — and we’re ready to be deployed wherever they’re needed.