John,
In Texas, you cannot register to vote online.
There’s no automatic voter registration. No same day voter registration. You have to go down to the county courthouse and make an appointment with the county registrar. Or you have to be lucky enough to run into a certified volunteer deputy registrar (VDR).
Our Powered by People volunteers are those certified VDRs. They’re the ones who go out and meet these future voters where they are — on college campuses, outside of high schools, at concerts, clubs, churches, wherever we can find people.
Not only do we bring them onto the rolls, but we also personally stay in touch with each voter to answer their questions, help them should they be purged from the voter file, and then to nudge them until we can confirm that they have cast that ballot.
We ran this program in 2024. Young people turned out to vote in Texas at a rate of about 39%. The young people who came through our program turned out at a rate of over 79%.
And it just follows common sense. If you have a personal connection with the person who registered you to vote, and if that person is also reminding you, “Hey, it's time to vote,” there's a much better chance that you're actually gonna get that done.
We've got to stay in touch with them. We've got to turn them out. We've got to help them when they confront voter suppression and voter intimidation, which will be coming full force in states like Texas.
It's going to be tough, and we should be clear-eyed about it. But I also believe that with the right attitude and the right work, and with enough of us coming at it, we can overcome this challenge, just as this country has overcome even bigger ones before.
It’s not going to be easy, but we can do this.
We can win in 2026, but only if we continue to register and turn out voters across Texas. Can you help support this work by chipping in $3 or whatever makes sense to you today?
Thank you,
Beto
