CEO Update: 180 days until Election Day

NEW: The VoteAmerica Research Center

VoteAmerica doesn’t just run programs, we also measure their impact on turnout, and then we share our results publicly so that other groups can use our research to design better programs. Measuring impact isn’t easy for many reasons, including that (1) we don’t actually know if someone voted until the following year, (2) we don’t control access to the product we’re marketing, meaning that we’re trying to help people vote but we don’t control the distribution of ballots and the ease of access, (3) the dominant form of measurement, namely Randomized Controlled Trials, is an excellent way to measure direct voter contact – such as text, email, and direct mail, but a terrible way to measure the mass media campaigns that VoteAmerica often runs, (4) there’s no actual control group during a busy election since everyone and her mother is contacting your control group using the same medium and message, and (5) no one wants to fund tests during off-years, which are the best years to test anything.

Anyway, despite this, my various organizations have produced about 50 academic studies at this point, and I decided to put them all on the public internet at https://research.voteamerica.com.  And then some of my colleagues at other organizations allowed me to share some of their work as well.  I expect this repository to grow over time.  Here are two articles that you should read sooner rather than later:

• Professor Scott Minkoff’s observational analysis on the impact of universal vote by mail (UVBM) and permanent absentee voting (PAV) on voter turnout.  Highlights for those of you who don’t want to click: (1) turnout is significantly higher in the universal vote by mail states than it is in the battleground states, because ease of voting – and not partisan spending – increases turnout.  (2) Signing people up to vote by mail increases turnout anywhere from 10-30 percentage points, with the highest increases happening among the 18-24 year old cohort.
• Professor Christopher B. Mann and Professor Katherine Haenschen meta-analysis of voter mobilization tactics by electoral salience.  This one is almost a brutal read because it shows how little impact many tactics have on turnout, especially during a presidential election.  Some highlights: robocalls have no impact on turnout during a presidential election year (0.0 point increase in turnout), and warm SMS is more than twice as effective as cold SMS during a presidential election year (0.68 points vs 0.22 points).

NEW: VoteAmericaPlus.org

Everyone has a plus+ service, as now so do we.  VoteAmerica builds great software, and now you can license our software, white-label it, and use it to power your voter mobilization programs.  This will save you millions in software development costs, while also helping us build something of a sustainable revenue stream.  These are not the only tools on the market, but they are the best, and if you’re considering licensing software this cycle, you should license it from us.  Here’s why:

• The software is SOC2 certified, HIPAA compliant, and is pen-tested annually by a third party firm that we pay to try to break into our systems.  This means the software is insanely secure, which is important when you’re dealing with sensitive data.
• The software is blazingly fast, and delightful on all devices (computer, tablet, mobile)
• Everything is hosted on AWS, so it can handle as much traffic as you can throw at it. If our software is down, so is the internet.
• We’re not venture backed and we’re not a for-profit company.  For profit voter mobilization is immortal.  Every dollar of “profit” from VoteAmerica+ funds VoteAmerica’s nonpartisan voter mobilization programs.
• Our pricing is very fair, we offer steep discounts for C3s and C4s, and if you have a contract with an existing provider already, we will honor it so that you don’t pay twice.
• If you’d like to chat more, just email sales@voteamerica.com and Emma will take care of you. 

NEW: FutureVoter.com and the FutureVoter embeddable product

Every state but one will let you register to vote before you’re 18.  This is called pre-registration, and it’s the best.  The registration is marked as “pending” until the person turns 18 and then it’s automatically activated.  This means we don’t need to wait until someone turns 18 to register them to vote.  High schoolers are on the table here, which is great since the single best predictor of how consistently you vote is how old you are the very first time you vote.  And if you can get a young person to vote in three consecutive elections, they will become a lifetime voter.  So our collective goal should be to engage citizens well before they can vote, and guide them through those first few years so that we can prevent low voter turnout instead of trying to treat it after the fact.  Here’s how FutureVoter works:

• It’s meant for high schoolers, so anyone 13-17
• It captures basic information, including name, DOB, and cell phone number.
• If the person is old enough for pre-registration, we guide them through that process.  If they’re not, the software automatically texts them as soon as they are old enough for pre-registration with a “Happy Birthday, you’re old enough to pre-register to vote in your state” message.
• The software also automatically texts everyone on their 18th birthday with a “Happy Birthday, you are definitely old enough to register to vote now, so let’s take care of that” message.

There are 15.9 million high schoolers, which is 15.9 million opportunities to build great voting habits. Consider this a “soft launch” for now, with a proper launch coming soon.  In the meantime, FutureVoter is offered as embeddable software, so email sales@voteamerica.com if you’d like to use it as part of your work.

NEW: Countmore.us

Students have dual-residency, which means they can choose to register to vote using their campus address, or back home using their parent’s home address.  But not all votes are created equally, especially during a presidential election.  Countmore.us is a simple website (and soon to be embeddable product) that lets students know where their vote counts more in the presidential election.  We launched this one in partnership with Frontseat.org, a small team of certified do-gooders based in Seattle.  This is actually a soft-launch, but there will be a proper launch in the fall when the students head back to school. 

NEW: Voterbowl.org

Sweepstakes are all the rage this year, probably because they’re somewhat gimmicky and donors love a good gimmick.  The sweepstakes generally involve an expensive or lucrative prize (ex: a Tesla) and you enter by checking your voter registration status.  This ensures legal compliance: you can’t pay someone to register, and you can’t pay someone to vote, but you can offer them an incentive to check their status.  Anyway, we weren’t interested in sweepstakes because the overwhelming majority of people who enter them are already registered to vote (since 80% of the country is already registered to vote).  Also because we have no interest in buying a Tesla, or getting Taylor Swift tickets, or anything like that.  But we’re still testing some interesting things with our Frontseat.org collaborators, and if this works we will use sweepstakes as a way to encourage registered voters to sign up to vote-by-mail.

Our spin is simple: no prizes, just cash, specifically cash in the form of Amazon gift cards. Amazon has an API which makes this straightforward. We’re currently testing different sweepstakes on college campuses, to find the “sweet spot” in terms of the incentive.  Here are some things we are testing:

1. Everyone who checks their voter registration status gets a $5 Amazon gift card.
2. One person wins $100 every day this week.
3. One person wins $1000 at the end of a 7 day period.

Gambling theory tells us that the guaranteed small prize is less appealing than the much smaller chance to win a much larger prize, but we’ll see. Also before you ask: yes, I did consult a lawyer before we started running the first experiment. If anyone takes issue with this, we’ll just run it as a sweepstakes where you have a 1 in one million chance of losing instead of a 1 in one million chance of winning. 

NEW: VoteAmerica Democracy Fellow Program

Ok, we actually launched this last year, but I didn’t mention it to anyone.  We created a paid fellowship program for tenure and tenure-track professors as a way of combining deep academic expertise with our deep practitioner expertise. Our first fellow is Professor Scott Minkoff, who some of you might recognize as a long-time collaborator as well.  I had been kicking around the idea of this program for a few years now, Scott was going on sabbatical, and two generous donors liked the idea. This fellowship program has allowed Scott to work full-time with VoteAmerica on everything from program design, to execution, and analysis.  It’s why we had the resources needed to analyze the true impact of voting-by-mail on turnout.  His work with us over the past few months has changed our 2024 focus completely, and is the reason I have been out there evangelizing vote by mail as a turnout tactic to anyone who will listen. In other words, the program has been a success.  Unfortunately Scott refuses to leave academia, and he won’t let me start Minkoff University, so he won’t be full-time with us come this fall. Fortunately, we have funding for 1-2 more paid fellows.  If you know any PhDs who would be a good fit, please send them my way.  We offer a dollar for dollar replacement of your current salary, up to $10,000 per month.