Carnegie Corporation of New York grantees are using a range of strategies in response to the changing conditions of voting in America and are working to expand options to make voting easier, more accessible, and more convenient
From DJs and dancing to fish fries, barbecues, bubbles, and photo booths, voting sites throughout North Carolina took on a decidedly festive air during the 2022 midterm election. But all that fun was strategic — a response to heightened concern about voter intimidation. “We know one of the most effective forms of de-escalation is people power,” says Serena Sebring, executive director of Blueprint NC (North Carolina) — an organization operating within the umbrella of State Voices, a Carnegie Corporation of New York grantee — which organized the events. “Having people present and setting a tone of celebration raises the entry level for wanting to disrupt or terrorize people.” This year, she explained, voters’ fears of disruption were especially strong in the wake of the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, ongoing mass shootings, and a local history of voter suppression.
Over the years, organizations like Blueprint NC have engaged a range of strategies in response to the changing conditions of voting in America. Challenges in this area are as old as the United States itself, and grantees are contending with problems ranging from voter intimidation to low registration rates to a proliferation of laws that limit the right to vote.
Why aren’t we doing whatever we can to make it easier for people to turn out and vote?
Recently, despite these difficulties, turnout has been rising: the 2018 midterm election drew 50.3 percent of the voting-eligible population, the highest for a midterm in four decades. And at 66.8 percent, the 2020 elections saw the highest proportion of voters for a presidential election in over a century. Votes are still being counted for the 2022 midterms, but experts believe that a smaller proportion of Americans voted than in 2018. “In some states, voter enthusiasm exceeded the high mark set in 2018,” the Washington Post reported, with competitive races often seeing higher turnouts. In other places, it fell far short of those levels.
These mixed results raise a question that has motivated the Corporation’s investments in democracy for years: “Why aren’t we doing whatever we can to make it easier for people to turn out and vote?” asks Geri Mannion, managing director of the Corporation’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy program. “For instance, why not get Americans automatically put on the rolls when they are still in high school, so that when they are 18, they get a letter that says, ‘Congratulations, you are now a voter’? It could be done easily.” In the absence of such blanket policies, more responsibility falls to individual voters — and to the organizations that encourage them to vote.
Even before the pandemic struck, it was clear that 2020 would be remarkable for civic engagement groups. The year promised not just a presidential election but also a census, and Corporation grantees were working hard to ensure a fair and accurate count. According to Gary Bass, who chairs the Census Equity Initiative as senior advisor and executive director emeritus of the Bauman Foundation, the census requires years of preparation. “It takes a decade: the way questions are formed, the amount of money Congress provides, the testing of the census and online aspects to make sure there isn’t a digital divide. And then, how do you grapple with the consistent problem of historically undercounted populations?” The decennial process determines how many seats each state can claim in the House of Representatives, how much federal funding local communities receive, and other crucial outcomes for the next 10 years. One such outcome is especially key to voting: the census provides population counts that help localities redraw their district boundaries for congressional and local elections. Bass notes that “census data are also used to determine the availability of multiple languages for election assistance so that people have ballot or other election materials in their native language.”
During this high-stakes time, the pandemic added a new twist for pro-voting organizations, which rely on face-to-face contact with citizens. Social-distancing protocols forced activists to switch to a digital approach; they used Zoom, texting, and social media to canvass, register voters, and get out the vote. They also used digital means to keep voters apprised of shifting rules around voting. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), according to chief executive officer Arturo Vargas, relied on media partners and social media to conduct a “massive voter education campaign.” Using Telemundo, Facebook, and Twitter, they updated Latino voters on such matters as how to obtain absentee ballots and how to complete them correctly.
The pandemic didn’t stop innovative civic engagement groups from making inroads with new populations. In 2020, Vot-ER found that when a health professional provides information to their community about voter registration, a person otherwise thought of as unlikely to vote is 20 percent likelier to do so, according to executive director Aliya Bhatia and TurboVote data. Since its founding that year, Vot-ER has provided materials to more than 30,000 health-care professionals in 700 different hospital and clinical sites — 73 percent of participating sites primarily serve the uninsured and 49 percent serve rural communities. During the pandemic, health-care professionals witnessed firsthand how marginalized people were disproportionately affected because of “nothing to do with individual decisions but with a broken system,” says Bhatia. “Our health systems are heavily influenced by decisions that policymakers make, and so much of what health-care professionals can do is a result of what policy allows them to do. Their desire to provide effective care has made health-care professionals more aware of the importance of their vote and their patients’ votes.”
And in 2020, when some 1.5 million people registered to vote on National Voter Registration Day (NVRD), the annual voter registration holiday, both local and national partners played a role. “Large companies are buying into and finding it important to participate in the civic engagement process and remind people to vote,” says Debi Lombardi, former program director of NVRD.
Our health systems are heavily influenced by decisions that policymakers make, and so much of what health-care professionals can do is a result of what policy allows them to do. Their capacity to provide effective care has made health-care professionals more aware of the importance of their vote and their patients’ votes.
All these efforts contributed to a sky-high turnout. An unprecedented percentage of voters cast a ballot for the first time, a third of the country voted early, and the 2020 electorate became the most racially diverse in history: Black voter turnout rose 3 percent from the last presidential election, and Asian American Pacific Islander voter turnout increased an astonishing 39 percent.
But in the wake of these successes, some Americans — encouraged by outgoing President Trump, who falsely claimed his loss was illegitimate — cast doubt on the results of the election. Allegations of voter fraud led to numerous audits of election results. According to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, of the 62 cases brought by Trump and his allies, only one was successful. Twenty-two of the judges who oversaw those cases were appointed by Republican presidents, including 10 who were appointed by Trump himself. Election officials called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.” In this context, the midterm results may seem encouraging: turnout was high, and multiple pro-democracy secretaries of state triumphed against election deniers. These officials will oversee the next elections in states such as Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia.
In addition to being secure, the 2020 election was also one of the friendliest to voters — thanks to a host of new state laws. Since in-person voting created just as much COVID risk as in-person organizing, states took steps to expand options. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, many states made it easier to vote by mail — whether by pushing back deadlines for ballot receipt or by expanding eligibility. Ballot drop boxes facilitated the process. Harris County in Texas attracted applause, and consternation, by offering 24-hour drive-through voting. (In 2022, the Texas state legislature discontinued this practice.)
This expansion of options was in line with years of efforts, on the part of Corporation grantees, to make voting more accessible. “The Corporation was an early supporter of research and advocacy that led to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,” Mannion notes, “and since then, the Corporation has invested in a wide range of ways to make voting easier, more accessible, and more convenient in order to ensure that people — especially people with busy lives, with children, with disabilities, with two or three jobs — should be able to vote, without being limited to a particular time period on a Tuesday.”
The new policies proved particularly useful for some of the low-propensity groups with whom grantees work. Studies indicate that working-class voters find it more challenging to vote in person on Election Day because of work schedules and transportation needs, among other factors — and that community includes most Latino voters, says Clarissa Martinez de Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS. “Early voting and vote by mail are important options,” says Martinez de Castro, “and remarkable turnout among Latino voters in 2020, powered by community registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, was supported by greater use of these alternatives.” Latinos cast 16.6 million votes in 2020, a 30.9 percent increase over the turnout in the last presidential election, according to the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute.
Similarly, Sarah Jaynes, executive director of the Heartland Fund, highlighted the benefits of mail-in voting for the rural people her organization serves. Often, a large geographic area relies on a single polling place located a long drive from people’s homes and workplaces, she says.
Further, for rural people of color, waiting on long lines in such settings can feel uncomfortable. By contrast, the expansive measures of 2020, according to Jaynes, were “extremely helpful.”
Yet the 2020 election — while “a civic miracle in many respects,” notes Wendy Weiser, the Brennan Center’s vice president for democracy — had “some serious warts,” including a large gap in turnout by race. According to Weiser, 71 percent of white voters voted, whereas 58 percent of people of color did — the kind of gap that Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), describes as “large enough to be outcome determinators.” In the years since 2020, some of the expansive voting legislation has remained in effect. California, for instance, mails its citizens ballots and offers readily available drop boxes and early voting days, says Saenz. Many other states have moved to permanent no-excuse absentee ballots or increased early voting opportunities.
But multiple states have passed laws making it harder to vote. Some have limited the mail-in voting option that proved so successful during the pandemic, whether by reducing the number of drop boxes or by imposing stricter identification requirements for mail-in ballots. Others have cut early voting days or purged voters from rolls.
These developments are part of a longer pattern. Since 2011, laws eroding voting rights have proliferated, abetted by recent Supreme Court decisions, such as Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), which have made such laws harder to fight in court. “We’ve not seen anything like the volume we’ve seen after the 2020 election,” Weiser says. “It’s really supercharged, a significant escalation in terms of volume and severity.” In addition, the Brennan Center has been tracking a new subset of laws, which have multiplied in 2022, that attack the election process itself — laws that make it easier for “partisans to meddle in election administration or vote counting,” says Weiser, “or to attack the people or processes that make elections work.”
Also on the rise are the number of bills that would change the ballot measure process, which allows citizens to collect petition signatures and add a law, question, or issue to a statewide or local ballot for popular vote. In 2017, the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center tracked 33 bills that would change the process, according to Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the center; in 2021, it tracked 146 such bills, a 300 percent increase. 2022 has seen the introduction of 109 bills; 58 would have restricted the ballot measure process. “We often talk about the three branches of government: executive, judicial, legislative. It is my opinion that we are remiss to not include a fourth branch of government: the people,” Figueredo says. “We believe a thriving democracy must include ballot measures. Some of the fundamental questions before us are: Do we have a democracy as we say we do? Do people see themselves reflected in it? And are we giving them opportunities or avenues to engage?”
Meanwhile, another Supreme Court case looms on the horizon: Moore v. Harper. The case rests on an idea called “independent state legislature theory.” Widely discredited by experts, the theory argues that the Constitution grants state legislatures nearly total control over federal elections. Adoption of the theory could mean important provisions of state constitutions — such as gerrymandering bans and the right to a secret ballot — would no longer hold. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on December 7, 2022, with a decision to follow.
Some of the fundamental questions before us are: Do we have a democracy as we say we do? Do people see themselves reflected in it? And are we giving them opportunities or avenues to engage?
Against this bevy of legal developments, Carnegie grantees have needed to educate — and to litigate. The Brennan Center has filed an amicus brief in Moore v. Harper describing the theory as “radically at odds with how elections have been run in the United States for centuries” and arguing that it would cause chaos in elections nationwide and “endanger or disrupt vast amounts of law, policy, and practice.” Organizations like MALDEF have filed lawsuits against a range of efforts to restrict the vote, such as voter purges and violations of the National Voter Registration Act. The Native American Rights Fund has sued over issues including ballot collection, registration limitations, and a matter especially important to Native Americans living on reservations: home address requirements for voters. This prerequisite was litigated in North Dakota from 2016 to 2020, and Arizona just passed a new address requirement, according to Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund. “In Arizona, the state legislature is aware that those don’t exist on many reservations, so they’re creating a requirement that is impossible to meet.” As laws shift, grassroots organizations have needed both to keep voters abreast of such changes and to think strategically about how to handle them.
Threats to voting have been arriving from outside the legal system, too. In the last couple of years, notes Page Gleason, senior program officer of the State Infrastructure Fund, based at NEO Philanthropy, there has been a “huge uptick” in threatening behavior at voting locations, a “demonstrable difference in people showing up to polls with guns and dogs.” A number of leading activists, she says, have received death threats or have been “doxxed” — meaning they have had their personal information, such as addresses and names of family members, published online without their consent. Some have hired private security firms. In Michigan, according to Erica Teasley Linnick, vice president of the State Infrastructure Fund, some voters received robocalls informing them that if they voted by mail, debt collectors, the police, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would receive their information. The people behind the calls were “prosecuted — but you can’t unring the bell,” she points out. “If you hear something that scared you, you think: ‘I don’t need to vote that badly.’”
A “violent political culture” distinguished this midterm election from that of 2018, says Jaynes. In response to these developments, foundations such as Carnegie Corporation of New York fund national voter-protection hotlines in four languages, staffed by lawyers and election experts whom grantees support. Additionally, the Brennan Center put out a guide called Voters Should Not Be Intimidated, which cites the laws that prevent certain kinds of intimidation. The idea, Weiser says, is to make voters “confident the law is on their side.’”
Meanwhile, an overlapping problem has been on the rise: disinformation. Disinformation may cover the voting process — for instance, “misleading low-propensity voters into thinking Election Day is not Tuesday, November 8 — or telling them their precinct has changed when it hasn't," says Saenz. Or it may cover substance, “falsities about candidates or measures.”
Certain communities are more vulnerable to disinformation than others, such as rural communities, according to Jaynes, which often lack local newspapers. Rebecca Carson, director for Inclusive Democracy Programs at Four Freedoms Fund, also at NEO Philanthropy, explains that any community of new voters — particularly new-citizen voters from immigrant communities — tends to be at risk, because they have more information to absorb than experienced voters. Most Latino voters get their information about elections from social media, particularly YouTube, according to Vargas, CEO of NALEO, rather than traditional news channels. They can also receive disinformation in two languages — and Spanish-language disinformation is harder to track.
The Four Freedoms Fund’s grantees are responding to this problem in a number of ways. According to program officer Juliana Cabrales, Chinese for Affirmative Action has launched a fact-checking website designed to combat the proliferating false narratives on such platforms as WeChat. NALEO has launched a campaign called Defiende la Verdad, which Vargas describes as “an effort to educate community leaders on recognizing misinformation and disinformation in the civic engagement space and reporting it to a tool we call Junkipedia.”
Young voters have a complex relationship with disinformation: on the one hand, they are new to the system, and “a lot of times they don’t know what they don’t know as new voters unfamiliar with the process,” according to Carolyn DeWitt, president and executive director of Rock the Vote. On the other hand, they are deeply familiar with the online landscape, and thus often perceive it more skeptically than their elders. For that reason, Rock the Vote has encouraged young voters to help older family members sift through online information — there is “opportunity for teamwork there,” says DeWitt, “that is multigenerational.”
The singular experiences of the 2020 election had direct effects on the 2022 midterms. Many voted differently: Latinos, for instance, “had traditionally tended to vote in person on Election Day,” notes Martinez de Castro. But according to polling data from late October 2022, just a third of Latinos were planning to vote on Election Day, and of the remaining two-thirds, half were planning to vote early and half by mail, she says. Those trends were strengthened by the pandemic, when grantees like UnidosUS “did a lot of work to make sure people were aware of those other options.”
For civic engagement groups, says Alexis Anderson-Reed, chief executive officer of State Voices, “2020 forever changed how we will organize and register voters. Prior to 2020, everyone knew digital was important, but now it is central to everything,” and groups are seeking the best ways to incorporate digital techniques and technologies into their work. Gleason describes the current model as a new hybrid “layered” approach, one that combines digital and in-person strategies.
Maya Wiley, president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, highlights another development: a new model of ongoing, collaborative relationships among civic engagement groups of all stripes. While groups have long worked together, the exigencies of 2020 — from the pandemic to the census count to the presidential election — prompted them to “break down silos” and unite in a deeper and longer-lasting way. “So now,” she said shortly before the midterm election, “we’ve got a boiler room on election protection, and we could do that because of the trust we’ve built across groups since 2020. The boiler room has people coming back together from unions, think tanks, messaging, legal, locals — all the tracks.”
The 2020 election morphed the election-year calendar, too. The counting of ballots went on for weeks after Election Day, and audits based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud stretched on for months. This aftermath, like the run-up to the election, took a toll. “We are experiencing some downstream effects of that now,” says Carson of Four Freedoms Fund. Similarly, Gleason describes a sense of depletion stemming from challenges like disinformation and antidemocracy bills, for organizers and voters alike. Everyone is “frustrated and confused and tired. That is one of the intents of these blatant and subtle attempts to suppress the vote.”
Yet these difficulties aside, “early data from the 2022 election cycle indicate that many organizations reached record numbers of voters,” Carson points out. And perhaps even the challenges offer signs of hope. Anderson-Reed reflects on the high turnout of 2020, especially among young people and people of color, and the backlash against that participation, such as election denial and the limitations on voting options. “Why was there backlash?” she asks. “Because we have power. There wouldn’t be this much time, effort, and money put into attacking people’s right to vote if democracy didn’t work and folks in this country didn’t have power. It means we are doing something right. 2020 was just one example, but we see examples all across the country every single day.”
Abigail Deutsch’s writing appears in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She teaches at the Columbia Journalism School.
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