Home | Democracy & Our Future | Our Homes & Communities | Cooperation
Effective Activism | Fundraising | National Groups | About & Contact
Articles Deliver Quickly for Voting Activists
Inspiration, motivation, how to make programs better. Articles deliver the same benefits as videos or books, but they have some distinct advantages. They come in smaller bites, so they are easier to digest. They are often more tightly focused on particular information, so they can more directly address what the activist needs right now. And they are easy, quick, and inexpensive to reproduce.
Articles often deliver practical how-to information in a manner that is easily distributed and easily absorbed by volunteers and staff in meetings and training sessions. Benefits grow because we include publications such as training manuals and reports about what works best in voter registration and turnout programs. Newspaper, periodical or journal articles, speeches, and interviews are also included.
We have generally tried to select for the best articles with the most useful content.
Increasing Voter Participation in America: Policies to Drive Participation and Make Voting More Convenient. By Danielle Root & Liz Kennedy. This detailed 50-page study from the Center for American Progress, linked here as a print-quality PDF, explains how barriers and cynicism keep millions from voting. It suggests ten solutions: Automatic voter registration; Same-day voter registration; Preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds; Online voter registration; In-person early voting; No-excuse absentee voting; Sufficient resources and ensure voting is accessible; Restore rights for formerly incarcerated people; Strengthen civics education; and, Invest in voter engagement and outreach. This study provides an overview of how we can greatly increase voting, and this in turn can help voting registration and turnout activists see where they fit in the larger pro-democracy movement. Read Report >>
From the Center for American Progress
July 11, 2018
How to Increase Voter Turnout (With Research-Backed Strategies). By Tony Joy. Starting by considering just why it is that people don't vote, Joy lays out several steps with proven effectiveness in turning out voters. These include helping voters make a plan, repeatedly contacting them personally, utilizing social and peer pressure to reinforce that voting is a civic duty, providing voters with better information, and more. Read Article >>
From CallHub (A political voice and SMS service business)
December 7, 2019
11 Barriers to Voting. By the Carnegie Corporation. The most common ways voting rights are undermined are laid out in 11 short descriptions, from voter ID requirements, through voter roll purges and polling place closures, to seemingly every imaginable measure to make access to voting places more difficult. Read Article >>
From the Carnegie Corporation
November 1, 2019
How to Increase Voter Turnout in Communities Where People Have Not Usually Participated in Elections. By Melissa R. Michelson. Personal contact to urge voting can be enough to cause many low-income minority people to see themselves anew, as the sorts of people who regularly go to the polls on Election Day, according to Michelson. In turn, voting even once can become habit forming, reinforcing self-identification as "a voter" long after the initial conversation with a canvasser. What is more, voter contacts have strong spillover effects within households, boosting participation by others as much as 60 percent. Read Article >>
From the Scholars Strategy Network
September 10, 2020
Lift Every Voice: The Urgency of Universal Civic Duty Voting. By the Working Group on Universal Voting. Born of their desire to fight back against legal assaults on voting rights and the proliferation of new techniques to keep citizens from voting, this report calls for consideration of universal "civic duty" voting. "Imagine," they write, "an American democracy remade by its citizens in the very image of its promise, a society where the election system is designed to allow citizens to perform their most basic civic duty with ease. Imagine that all could vote without obstruction or suppression. Imagine elections in which 80 percent or more of our people cast their ballots." Read Report >> Watch Video >>
From The Brookings Institution and The Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard
September 21, 2020
Increasing Voter Turnout: It's Tougher Than You Think. By Alan Gerber & Gregory A. Huber. While many turnout methods have very small effectiveness, several stand out as potentially more productive. These include successfully completed volunteer phone calls and successfully completed volunteer canvassing contacts, where it is the personal contact that appears to be key. Another method of demonstrated effectiveness is to focus messaging on creating direct and indirect peer pressure. Read Article >>
From The Stanford Social Innovation Review
March 7, 2016
Five Studies on the Causes and Consequences of Voter Turnout
Increasing Voter Turnout in Local Elections
Will It Ever Be Possible To Get Out The Youth Vote?
Voter Turnout: MIT Election Data Science Lab
Civic Responsibility: The Power of Companies to Increase Voter Turnout
Looking beyond voter turnout directly, three articles addressing democracy issues more broadly help by placing voting activists' efforts in a larger social and political context.
America's Pro-Democracy Movement
Return To Strengthening Democracy Resources Home >>
Published: August 2019
Revised: July 2023
To Link Or Republish >>
Home | Democracy & Our Future | Our Homes & Communities | Cooperation
Effective Activism | Fundraising | National Groups | About & Contact
StrengtheningDemocracyNOW.com
© Copyright 2023 Dennis Church