It might be an understatement to say there were unprecedented and unexpected obstacles to voting in 2020, but our organization was prepared and nimble enough to navigate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and a panoply of changing ways to cast a ballot.
Early in the year, we spent a good amount of time envisioning how the pandemic would affect the process of voting in 2020, and in May we produced, Voting in the Era of COVID-19, a report for election officials and advocates on policy proposals for safeguarding voter registration, voting by mail and in-person voting. We also initiated litigation in response to the pandemic, identified the dire need for poll workers across the country, and made a quick late pivot to engage heavily in Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoffelections. And like so many others, we had to adapt to working remotely and confront the formidable task of organizing without the benefit of in-person staff contact.
This required us to shift our programming efforts and expand our reach, with the help of newly hired staff, including Campus Vote Project state coordinators in Wisconsin and Georgia. We added deputy state coordinators in six key states and 343 Democracy Fellows on 150 campuses. More than 280 campuses participated in our Voter Friendly Campus program, which empowered us to connect with more than 3.4 million students in 41 states and DC. As students were displaced from their home institutions, state and local election officials were making changes to registration and voting guidelines in the face of the pandemic, which meant our ability to reach students with accurate, up-to-date information was more important than ever
A substantial increase in student voting on our partner campuses speaks to the success of our work in 2020. Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), estimates that 53-56% of voting-eligible young people ages 18-29 cast a ballot in the presidential election, a significant increase from 45-48% in 2016. In Georgia and Virginia, student voting represented 20% of ballots cast statewide.
Global “Black Lives Matter” protests in the summer following the murder of George Floyd prompted us to take time to reflect on our organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). We hired a professional facilitator specializing in DEI to lead our team in ongoing and sometimes difficult conversations about race, white supremacy, oppression, and implicit biases, and how to address them personally and organizationally.
Two new members of our Board were added this year, we welcomed Erika Moritsugu, Vice President for Congressional Relations/Economic Justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Prior to her work at the National Partnership, Erika managed the Government Relations, Advocacy and Community Engagement team at the Anti-Defamation League. We also welcomed Joi Chaney, executive director of the Washington Bureau and SVP for Policy and Advocacy at the National Urban League. She is a former Chief of Staff for Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, who also served as an advisor to the Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Obama Administration.
We’re also pleased to welcome Rebekah Caruthers to fill the new role of Vice President. Rebekah is an attorney who brings more than 15 years of experience to the job. Some of her experience has been as an attorney but much of it has allowed her to add a strong campaign, training, and advocacy background to that role. In recent years, she has helped organizations as diverse as MoveOn.org and Everytown for Gun Safety design and implement major new initiatives. With MoveOn, in addition to strategic help on its “United Against Hate” campaign, she was responsible for a significant amount of HR work. She joined us in January 2021.
Here’s a quick look at some of the work we’ll be pursuing in 2021:
Despite the numerous challenges created by the pandemic and its effects on our elections, Fair Elections Center had an extremely successful 2020. Large numbers of students registered and voted, hundreds of thousands of new people signed up to be poll workers, and a record number of voters participated in a safe and secure general election.
We’re looking forward to adding more successes in 2021.
Sincerely,
In the spring it quickly became apparent COVID-19 was affecting primary voting: many older poll workers opted to stay home due to safety concerns, forcing numerous polling locations to be closed. This in turn created long lines and delays for voters. Many older voters, and those who are immunocompromised, also chose to stay away from voting. We took action, filing lawsuits in several states, to expand voting by mail and ensure a safer election for everyone, including those who cast their ballots in person. In addition to our pandemic-related litigation, we continued to oppose a voter purge in Wisconsin, worked to relax Tennessee’s restrictions on voter registration by organizations, and continued to pursue voting rights restoration in Kentucky, among other legal actions.
COVID-19 cases:
North Carolina: Along with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and WilmerHale LLP, we litigated a challenge to various restrictions on voter registration, mail-in absentee voting, and inperson voting that put voters’ rights and health at risk. We challenged geographic restrictions on pollworker recruitment, the state’s absentee ballot witness requirement, restrictions on absentee balloting assistance, the uniform hours requirement for early voting locations, and more. We secured a preliminary injunction ordering a cure procedure for minor defects in absentee ballot certificate envelopes and permission for a client who resides in a nursing home to vote with assistance from staff.
Subsequently, the state’s GOP-led legislature, the Trump campaign, and Republican Party brought two new cases in federal court trying to attack the absentee ballot cure procedure we had won. Those plaintiffs eventually tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court to take up their case. We filed an amicus brief that contributed to the Court declining to take upthe Trump campaign’s case, Wise v. Circosta, thereby preserving our victory.The balance of our claims in this case were rejected, but the cure process alone allowed at least 10,000 ballots to be counted.Kentucky: We filed a constitutional challenge in state court along with the Kentucky Equal Justice Center seeking to postpone implementation of the state’s new voter ID law and to extend helpful aspects of the state’semergency order that were in place for the June 23 primary election (such as no-excuse absentee voting) so that they would remain through the November election. We added a claimseeking an accessible and private way for visually impaired voters to cast ballots and moved for a temporary injunction. This case compelled the Secretary to State to extend all the voter opportunities and protections from the June primary to the November election.
Wisconsin: We represented eight individual voters (six of whom did not receive their ballots in the mail for the April primary), and two organizations, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans. We sought alternative, fail-safe ballot delivery methods for when requested ballots do not arrive by mail in time or at all, principally an extension of online access and downloading of mail-in absentee ballots or email delivery of ballots to voters. We continued to press our challenge to the state’s requirement that a mail-in absentee voter secure a signature from a witness on the ballot’s certificate envelope. We secured a preliminary injunction as to the alternative ballot delivery fail-safe, awarding voters who did not receive their requested ballot via mail eight days in which they could obtain a replacement ballot by online access or email delivery. The 7th Circuit initially concluded the Wisconsin Legislature had no standing to appeal the preliminary injunction, but after the Wisconsin Supreme Court answered that question as a certified question of state law, the 7thCircuit reversed itself and stayed our preliminary injunction. We quickly filed an application to vacate that stay at the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that application was denied without any noted dissents. It is unclear whether this case will continue. It will likely turn on the pandemic’s longevity. To date, it has largely been decided on the basis that the relief was ordered too close to an election. We are litigating this case with Stafford Rosenbaum LLP.
Pennsylvania: We filed litigation in state court on behalf of a voter at high risk of complications from COVID-19 who did not receive her mail-in ballot for Pennsylvania’s June primary, and was disenfranchised because she was unwilling to vote in person and thereby risk infecting herself and her 94-year-old mother. We sought an immediate hearing by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court under a state court procedure. Unfortunately, the court did not grant our motion. Our client received and successfully voted her ballot, and we ultimately dismissed the case for strategic considerations. Our legal partner on this matter was Hogan Lovells. We will consider refiling a similar case at a later date with different plaintiffs.
Tennessee Voter Registration Drive Restrictions: This litigation, which prompted the repeal of restrictive voter registration drive laws in Tennessee following a favorable preliminary injunction ruling, was formally dismissed this last fall.
Virginia Language Assistance: We continued to communicate with Fairfax County regarding translations of election and voting materials into Spanish and Vietnamese as required by Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. We successfully pushed them to provide multilingualinstructions with vote by mail ballots in the general election and have not filed litigation to date. We are continuing to follow up with them on their implementation of Section 203. Our partners are LatinoJustice PRLDEF and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF).
Pending:
Wisconsin College/University ID case: This case emerged from a year in hibernation. After three and a half years, the 7th Circuit finally ruled in One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen, the case that was the basis for the district court to stay or suspend our challenge to the issuance date, expiration date,and signature requirements for college and university student ID cards to be used as voter ID. The 7th Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling that expired college and university ID cards can be used as voter ID, as long as they are shown with separate proof of current enrollment. However, due to a quirk in the way One Wisconsin Institute was litigated, these IDs must still bear issuance dates, expiration dates (not more than 2 years after those issuance dates), and signatures, even if Wisconsin election officials and poll workers are not using or relying upon those data points or features for anything. We argue in Common Cause v. Thomsen that these requirements are irrational, serve no purpose, and are therefore unconstitutional. Without seeking briefing from the parties, Judge James Peterson lifted the stay in the case. We amended our complaint and moved for a preliminary injunction directed at the November general election. The court instead ordered the parties to file cross-motions for summary judgment and a joint stipulation of facts. A hearing on these motions was scheduled for September 24, however the court changed its mind the night before and decided it was too close to the election to rule in our favor. Judge Peterson cancelled the hearing and postponed it to after the election. We do not yet have a new hearing date. We are litigating this case with Pines Bach LLP, a firm based in Madison, Wisconsin. We are representing Common Cause Wisconsin.
Kentucky Rights Restoration Case: Our motion for summary judgment was denied as moot by Judge Karen Caldwell. We moved for reconsideration as four of our clients still do not have their rights restored and are subject to a discretionary, arbitrary restoration system. Gov. Andy Beshear is fighting this case. He is also refusing to consider restoration applications submitted during his predecessor Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration and provided no notice to applicants that they needed to re-apply to be considered. This is illegal in our view, and we’re actively working on a state court case challenging this policy. We won’t file it until there is a final ruling on the merits in our federal action over arbitrary rights restoration.
With an important presidential election looming in November, our Campus Vote Project (CVP) expanded its staff by adding state coordinators in Wisconsin and Georgia (bringing the total to nine) and six deputy state coordinators, covering ten states: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Additional new staff also included a communications manager, a curriculum development coordinator, and four staffers dedicated to student poll worker recruitment.
CVP signed up 343 paid Democracy Fellows across our core states, a record for our organization. We also recruited 110 Work Elections Fellows to help with a massive poll worker recruitment program targeting ten states. The majority of our fellows are students of color and women. We help train them to become leaders and organizers, with skills that we hope will serve them and their communities beyond their academic years. Our fellows helped administrators and faculty draft and implement democratic engagement plans for their campuses, held their administrators accountable for those action plans, and helped organize activities and outreach for their peers.
Just as students were displaced from their home institutions, state and local election officials were making changes to registration and voting guidelines in the face of a pandemic. This made our ability to provide students with accurate, up-to-date registration and voting information through their institutions (whether they were in-person or remote) more important than ever.
We finished the year with 280 participating campuses in the program this cycle, exceeding our goal of 225. Through this network of partner campuses, we were able to ensure accurate information about voter registration, mail-in balloting, in-person voting, and polling place locations reached students from
their campus administrators and faculty. This was especially critical in the face of changes to election laws, polling site closures, and campus closures due to the pandemic. We supported campus partners in creating messages and programming to reach students, regardless of whether they were in classrooms or learning online, encouraging them to vote and helping ensure they understood the importance of participating.
With in-person activities curtailed, we shifted to an online organizing approach. We hostedwebinars covering how to get “vote ready”, voting by mail, student poll workers and getting out the vote. Our Curriculum & Research Coordinator put together an excellent program for all of our fellows that involved a revamped orientation with a designated space for discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work. Several sections of discussion blocks were offered, with topics including Organizing 101, Poll Working, and Voter Suppression.
Our coordinators organized voting summits for administrators, faculty and students in Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. More than 1,000 individuals participated, representing at least 216 college and university campuses. Notable guest speakers included Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, the Lt. Governors from Wisconsin and Michigan, and the Secretaries of State from Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Some of our efforts centered on collaborating around several major organizing endeavors, including National Poll Worker Recruitment Day, National Voter Registration Day, National Voter Education Week and Vote Early Day. These events provided students the opportunity to deepen their engagement with the electoral process and to acquire the information they needed to be prepared to confidently cast their ballots on Election Day.
Over the summer, we launched a program focused on identifying and addressing barriers to student voting on historically black college and university (HBCU) campuses and Black student voting on predominantly white campuses. We created a web page for our Legacy Initiative, with resources and information.After a series of roundtable discussions involving students on our HBCU Voter Friendly Campuses,we compiled emergingthemes into the HBCU Insights Brief. This brief, done in conjunction with the NAACP Youth and College Division, identifies four particular areas of voting barriers on HBCU campuses. The brief was distributed to HBCUs nationwide.
A four-part series of online programming, called Legacy Conversations, was conducted after release of the Insights Brief. The series focused on themes from the brief, including Misinformation/Disinformation, Working with Third-Party Organizations, Working with Government & Elected Officials, and Careers in Civic Engagement.
The Legacy Initiative rounded out the election cycle with a game show program to promote Get Out The Vote, entitled “HBCU Culture Clash.” This “Family Feud” style program featured eight renowned HBCU grads and faculty, answering questions about HBCU culture. The event host was nationally known comedian, Renny.“Commercial” breaks included video footage and promotional materials around voting and civic engagement resources, featuring “why I vote” segments from CVP Fellows and a guest appearance by actor Kerry Washington. This was done in collaboration with NAFEO, the national organization that represents HBCUs and other minority serving institutions.
Between the Legacy Initiative and our Voter Friendly Campus program, we worked with 21 HBCUs, including placing 34 Democracy Fellows on 15 campuses. This program is continuing in 2021 and 2022 with a dedicated program manager building out the student community and providing resources to their institutions.
After the November election, it was evident that the Senate run-off races in Georgia were going to be an opportunity for substantive change and that, given the usual drop-off in turnout for runoffs, we needed to continue to put resources into supporting student voters in the state. We looked to ensure that those students had the information they needed to register or re-register, request mail-in ballots, be aware of the deadlines for early voting, andfind their appropriate polling location, which may have changed from the polling site they used in November.
We expanded the number of stipended Democracy Fellows in the state from 14 to 43, who worked from late November through the January 5 election. Those Fellows sent direct texts, made phone calls, and engaged in other personal outreach to more than 246,000 Georgia voters. Our digital advertising and outreach campaign, through paid ads on social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram, generated roughly 12 million impressions between November 15 and January 5, with nearly 65,000 clickthroughs to our student-focused voting content. By working with Instagram influencers, weexpanded our reach to more than 3.8 million people. Influencer videos were viewed more than 100,000 times and stories were seen more than 95,000 times.
Make Your Voice Heard! Using this call to action, we ran a major organizing and advertising campaign focused on getting students to register and vote. We encouraged youth to vote by mail if they choose, vote early if they could, or vote in person on election day.
Our efforts connected students to information about registering, voting, and poll worker opportunities, and helped overcome the confusion around 2020’s election changes as well as a complicated runoff election. This ultimately helped increase turnout.
Metrics Definitions:
Presidential Election
Via Ads
Pre-roll
Facebook and Instagram
Via Influencers
TikTok
YouTube
Power The Polls:
Via Ads
Facebook and Instagram
Georgia Runoff:
Via Ads
Pre-roll
Facebook and IG
Via Influencers
Instagram
Our visionary investment in creating a new way to do poll worker recruitment paid off in unforeseen ways in 2020. With funding from the Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund in 2016, Fair Elections Center designed a website, WorkElections,com, to facilitate poll worker recruitment. For the first time, information about poll working would be aggregated in one place, and easily accessible to the public. In 2018, we expanded the project to cover nine states and we reached out to businesses, social service agencies like the YMCA, and language minority organizations to promote the use of the website. In 2019, we began to populate information from all 50 states (ramping up that effort in 2020), enabling visitors to learn about the requirements and details of being a poll worker (hours, compensation, training requirements, voter registration requirements, etc.), and quickly access their local jurisdiction’s poll workerapplications. Early in the year, we initiated conversations with a wide group of businesses and organizations about how to utilize our website to best recruit their employees and members, in addition to the general public. Then the pandemic hit, which immediatelyimpacted the primary elections. Thousands of poll workers (many over the age of 60 and vulnerable to the coronavirus) opted to stay home, which led to the closure of numerous voting locations, forcing hundreds of thousands of voters to wait in hours-long lines to vote.
Many companies and organizations quickly joined, including Uber, Microsoft, Levi’s, the National Basketball Association, and the NFL Players Association, as well as When We All Vote(led by Michelle Obama), and LeBron James’ group More Than A Vote. These business, organizations, and civic groups actively recruited their employees, customers, members, and others to be poll workers. Fair Elections Center brought many other nonprofits, serviceorganizations, and business coalitions into the effort, including the League of Women Voters, Color of Change, UnidosUS, NAACP and APIAVote. By October’s end, Power the Polls
included more than 140 partners.
Early in 2020, we hired a project manager to oversee WorkElections efforts, who trained and supervised a team of researchers, both paid and volunteer, to update the database, which now contains information on poll worker applications for more than 4,500 jurisdictions in 47 states (Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii conduct vote by mail). In the summer, we hired four people dedicated solely to recruitingstudents to be poll workers and brought on 111 college students as WorkElections Fellows to assist in recruitment.
We also worked with developers to improve the usability, security, and functionality of the website. We bolstered the site’s ability to quickly accommodate larger amounts of traffic, improved its layout, and clarified the way in which information is presented on jurisdictions’ pages.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) used WorkElections’ data when it created its own poll worker recruitment website. The EAC launched National Poll Worker Recruitment Day on Sept. 1, which was embraced by Power the Polls and partners all across the country.
As evidenced by its metrics, the project was very successful. From June 1 to Nov. 3, more than one million people visited WorkElections.com, the vast majority of those being new users. In that same time period, the website’s “Apply Now” buttons were clicked over 190,000 times. The Fellows completed more than 12,000 hours of related work, and made over 71,000 contacts (calls, texts and emails) to recruit poll workers and turn out voters. WorkElections
directly recruited 11,234 prospective poll workers to sign up through Power the Polls, as well as hundreds more through county websites and other means. And by the end of October, Power the Polls had recorded more than 710,000 sign ups of people who wanted to be a poll worker.
Each year, Fair Elections Center updates our concise, user-friendly resources that help voters understand how to register, vote, and help others to do so. As laws change and courts weigh in throughout the year, our legal staff continually update these materials, so everyone visiting our website has the correct information to better participate in our democracy.
Along with links to official voting websites, our state-specific voting guides include important registration deadlines and election dates, voter registration requirements, voter ID requirements, links to forms, and options on how to cast a ballot. We also provide answers to common questions for students and guidance on where students can register to vote, be it on their campus or back home.
Voter registration drive guides contain requirements for third parties engaged in that effort. They include requirements for gathering forms, where to return them, deadlines, and links for forms or other information.
When it became clear that there would be run-off races in both of the U.S. Senate contests in Georgia, we quickly produced a special election-specific voting guide and made a big push to get it in the hands of Georgia voters. This was shared with allies in Georgia, our 16 campus partners and their students, and nearly two million young people who were targeted with our digital ads.
In the summer, we brought on Berlin/Rosen, an experienced and well-respected communications firm to assist in our media outreach. The collaboration led to an impressive amount of coverage. From June through the end of November, Fair Elections Center and Campus Vote Project together had more than 900 earned media stories, in numerous major outlets, as well as in many regional newspapers and news websites. We also had op-eds placed in several key publications.
If you would like to make a gift online today, please visit www.bit.ly/FairElectionsCenterDonate
If you would like to make a gift by another method or have any questions or concerns, please
contact our Development Director Mary Anne Walker, at 202.248.5348 or
mwalker@fairelectionscenter.org
Fair Elections Center is a national, nonpartisan voting rights and election reform 501(c)(3) organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to uselitigation and advocacy to remove barriers to registration and voting, particularly those disenfranchising underrepresented and marginalized communities, and to improve election administration.
Fair Elections Center’s attorneys and advocates deliver nonpartisan creative solutions to the complex barriers that continue to be erected to prevent citizens from registering to vote and casting a ballot that counts. Working alongside other national and state civil rights and community-based organizations, the Center works to make the processes of voter registration, voting, and election administration accessible for every American, with a particular focus on underrepresented communities and students.
To these ends, Fair Elections Center litigates cutting-edge voting rights cases in federal and state court and engages in a wide variety of advocacy efforts, including: drafting election reform legislation and submitting testimony in support of positive reforms, advocating to defeat restrictive measures, producing reports on election modernization proposals and issues affecting communities of color and students, talking points and fact sheets, providingstate voter guides for all 50 states and D.C., conducting trainings and seminars on voting issues for community organizations and their supporters, and working directly with Secretaries of State and local election officials to ensure the right to vote is protected and expanded. We provide election law expertise to state-based civic engagement coalitions and direct help to organizations representing various communities that need help accessing the ballot as they plan their programs, encounter problems, or need help engaging election officials.
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