Unregistered potential voters may seem like a lost cause, but engaging with them could still make a difference in our democratic process.
Articulated Insight – “News, Race and Culture in the Information Age”
Tens of millions of eligible potential voters aren’t registered — and many are uninterested in changing that.
Despite that, there are opportunities to engage some unregistered voters by messaging on abortion and local issues, according to a series of focus groups from the Voter Participation Center, a nonpartisan, liberal-aligned nonprofit that aims to register and turn out members of underrepresented populations through direct mail and digital outreach. The focus groups, first shared with Score, were conducted by GBAO in February and consisted of six to seven participants in each group: unmarried women over 35; women under 35; Latinos; and men under 35, all of whom were not registered to vote.
As states across the country move to further restrict access to alternative voting methods to in-person voting on Election Day, like mail-in ballots or drop boxes, some unregistered voters feel discouraged from voting. Beyond logistical challenges, others expressed skepticism about the fairness of voting and dissatisfaction in the candidates running, as well as the feeling that the outcome of an election doesn’t impact their lives. Few participants were willing to change their views on voting.
But Tom Lopach, head of the Voter Participation Center, said this hard-to-move group can be swayed by bridging the information gap — and giving them “permission” to not know everything about voting. In some of last year’s elections, the group tested language saying, “You don’t have to be a physician to remove a splinter, and you don’t have to know everything about the government to be a voter,” which Lopach said was successful.
“If you feel like you don’t have the information to vote, that can heighten your sense of things being unfair,” he said. “And if you don’t feel fully engaged with or understanding of politics, government or elections, it can heighten your sense that you don’t want to be a part of it.”
Some focus group respondents noted that they care about abortion rights, but not enough to register nor head to the ballot box. That provides an opening, Lopach said, to conduct outreach framing abortion as an issue that is decided by the government and saying that if they register, they’ll be able to have their voice heard. Although abortion messaging has been supercharged on both sides of the aisle, Lopach argued that the broad cross-partisan approval for protecting abortion rights — as evidenced in red and purple states that voted to enshrine protections to the procedure over the last two years — makes it a promising way to communicate with this group.
He also noted that federal issues are often “a little too distanced from where people are,” instead emphasizing the importance of tying “tangible” local issues, like housing costs, to voting. Messaging around informal communities — ethnic or racial groups, church groups or schools, for instance — is also a potential way to reach unregistered voters, Lopach said, pointing to respondents in the focus groups who noted that they feel isolated from their cities or towns, but more connected to those “lowercase ‘C’ communities.”
“If you get seven pieces of mail reminding you to get out and vote and reminding you that most of your neighbors get out and vote and you’re in the minority by not voting, that pressure works,” he said. “Getting too political, getting too issue-oriented, doesn’t work. But making the process of voting feel accessible, making people feel seen and their communities feel seen, works.”
The Voter Participation Center — which plans to mail hundreds of millions of voter registration forms and other mailers this election cycle (something election officials have complained about in the past) — is also aiming to send out voter guides this year. The guides are still under development, but Lopach said they will likely focus on state-level elections, outlining an officeholder’s role and how it impacts people’s lives. The group’s largest voter registration mailing push comes around Labor Day, when people are really tuning into the election.
Lopach said he’s encouraged by high voter engagement in special elections and recent off-year elections and that voter registration response rates are higher than projected.
“If we can see some movement in this cycle, and then continue the work and continue to refine the language and the education we provide, … over time, we can increase those numbers,” Lopach said. “Oftentimes in politics, everybody’s just focused on the following November or the following November in two years. Our testing and our work, we have such a longer horizon, that we see incremental progress as a success.”
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