Dear Vote Forward friends,
 

I want to share a quick note about the implications that the COVID-19 pandemic has on our team and your efforts this year. It’s a stressful time for all of us as we take measures to safeguard the health and well-being of our friends, families, compatriots, and ourselves. We hope you’re doing well, or as well as possible under the circumstances. 

No one imagined we'd find ourselves in this situation as we prepared for this year's election cycle. While elections may not be top of mind, and we fully understand if your time and energy must be spent elsewhere, the Vote Forward community is still working toward our mission to increase voter turnout this fall. Our team is here to support you if you'd like to continue writing letters to encourage fellow citizens to vote this year. We have plenty of addresses for you to write to from the safety of your kitchen tables and living rooms, and we remain confident that a handwritten letter is one of the most effective ways of boosting voter turnout. So we're continuing to work with our volunteers to safely stockpile as many letters as possible to send in October.

One important request to our community: given the importance of physical distancing to stop the spread of the virus, we're no longer encouraging in-person letter-writing parties. We hope to be able to resume these gatherings at some point, but please suspend any in-person letter writing events you have organized, if you haven’t already done so. We know that you have mostly likely taken this step on your own, but if not, please do so. Your health is extremely important to us.

A few suggestions in lieu of in-person events:

• Some of our inventive volunteers have taken to leaving packets of letters by their front doors for friends and neighbors to pick up and return when completed. This can be a good, no-contact option for hosts who are able to coordinate the process.
• You can point curious friends to the Vote Forward website to create accounts of their own, adopt voters and print their own letters. For those without printers, let them know they can have letters printed at a local FedEx or UPS store and delivered to their homes. 
• Many letter writing parties have shifted to a virtual space using Zoom or Google Hangouts! We hear this has been a fun way to stay connected and meet fellow democracy warriors even as we’re physically distancing. 
• Our friends at Swing Left have written an excellent virtual organizing guide, and are orchestrating recurring virtual letter-writing parties. Check out the schedule for these and RSVP.

We’re paying close attention to the electoral landscape to assess the implications for our work. In particular, we’re prioritizing some new experiments to encourage enrollment in absentee and vote-by-mail programs. It's important to be deliberate about this, since the rules vary considerably from state to state, but we're eager to see how we can help encourage voting at home. Our first experiment to encourage enrollment in absentee voting is now live on the Vote Forward website (see link to Wisconsin voters below for more details). 

Finally, we want to encourage you all to be kind to yourselves and to one another. Now more than ever, we all need to make an extra effort to take care of each other during these trying times. 

Well-wishes to all, and thank you as always for all of your efforts. 

Scott Forman
Founder & Executive Director
Vote Forward
 

P.S. See below for some frequently asked questions about the implications of COVID-19 for voter turnout letters.

New campaign alert

• Letters to about 2000 registered voters in Wisconsin's 7th Congressional district. 
• Template: instructions on how to request an absentee ballot, and why you might want to.
• Goal: increase turnout in an upcoming special election, by encouraging absentee signups. 
• Mail date: as soon as possible, to allow as much time as possible for recipients to enroll. 
• Please only “adopt” voters if you can send them by the middle of next week (before 4/23).

FAQs

We've fielded a number of questions about our fall "Please vote!" campaigns. Here are answers to a few of the most common ones. We'll add more FAQs to the website over time.
 

Isn't October 27th too late to mail our letters?

Mailing one week before elections has worked in all of our randomized trials, with letters arriving days before the election when they have proven to have the greatest impact. For now, we're continuing to ask you to hold on to all your letters and send them on October 27th. We are monitoring the news about the USPS and electoral rules carefully and will be in touch if we need to change this instruction, but we think it's likely this will remain the optimal strategy even if mail-in voting becomes more common. 
 

Should we mention vote-by-mail in personal messages?

Should we mention COVID-19?

We understand the impulse to reference the current situation, but we suggest sticking with messages of encouragement that highlight the importance of voting in general rather than referencing the pandemic. It’s not possible to know now how a COVID-19-specific message will resonate in November. As always, nonpartisan messaging is more effective than partisan messaging for this kind of mobilization effort, so we also continue to ask that you not mention candidates by name or assume that the recipient agrees with you on fine-grained policy questions.