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Dear friend,
With only 10 days left to write letters to voters this year, I wanted to take a step back and share why I think this is so important.
Three years ago, I sat down at my kitchen table to do something a little unusual: write a thousand handwritten letters to voters in Alabama, asking them to cast ballots in an upcoming election.
Why? Because I had to do something concrete to help change what felt like an increasingly dark and chaotic trajectory in our civic life. And connecting with fellow Americans in this somewhat old-fashioned but highly personal way felt like just the thing.
I also had a hunch that these letters might actually succeed at increasing voter turnout. Modest expectations though! I figured, if I managed to convince even a few people to vote who otherwise wouldn’t have, my efforts would have been worthwhile.
It wasn’t until months later that I got the vote history data and conducted the analysis, and discovered that in addition to achieving a sore hand and a feeling of satisfaction at having taken action, I had increased voter turnout among the people who got a letter by more than three percentage points compared to the “control group” of people who didn’t get a letter: a big effect.
On the basis of that first result, along with several more experiments bolstering my confidence even further that this tactic really works, I decided to dedicate the next few years of my life to making Vote Forward as big as possible.
Fast forward to today, and I’m writing an email to you, one of more than 100,000 volunteers who have signed up to write letters to voters in 2020 as part of The Big Send, scheduled for next Saturday, October 17th, right before the most important election of our lifetimes, with democracy itself on the line.
You and your fellow volunteers have already written more than 11 million letters, and we’re deeply grateful for all of your work. But there’s more to do! We still have 3.4 million letters we need to prepare in the next 10 days!
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