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Power the Vote is launching the Blue Texas
project to fight + fund everywhere!
John,
We’ve heard the skeptics who say – it’s not possible to beat voter suppression.
I’m here to tell you, we can, and we have before.
Let me tell you a story (and invite you to join us for a community event on January 30!).
I was part of the voter protection team in Georgia in 2020. When we started, no one thought Georgia would flip blue.
Over late nights and early mornings, our scrappy team of democracy champions fought hard for every last Georgia vote. We helped hundreds of thousands of voters cast their ballots, and in the end, our work was part of the wave that flipped Georgia blue.
Just a few highlights from Georgia:
- We took 130,000 calls on our voter assistance hotline in 7 languages (English, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Urdu).
- A Republican group out of Texas filed challenges to 364,000 voters – and we defeated those challenges in 153 Georgia counties, without filing a single lawsuit.
- And in the November 2020 election, we helped 15,870 voters get their absentee ballots counted – President Biden won Georgia by just 12,670 votes.
I’ve seen what’s possible, and friend, we can beat voter suppression.
Pictured: Our fearless leader, Saira Amir Draper, in action, saving democracy in Georgia
That’s why, after the wins in Georgia, we founded Power the Vote to bring this work to other battleground states – and we set our sights on Texas.
You see, in 2020, Texas was ranked the #1 most difficult state for voting in America. Then in 2021, Republicans passed a new voter suppression law that made it even more difficult to vote.
The March 2022 primary was our first look at the impacts of the new law, and it was devastating. Statewide, 25,000 voters had their vote-by-mail ballots rejected and not counted. That’s a rejection rate of 13%, up from just 1-2% in 2020.
If that rejection rate had been in place in 2020, a whopping 130,000 voters would have been disenfranchised.
Even worse, a recent study found that voters of color were 30% more likely to have their ballots rejected than white voters.
Luckily, that’s not the end of the story. Power the Vote funded voter protection staff in Texas, and they went to bat for these voters. They educated voters, they helped voters fix problems with their ballots, and they worked with elections offices to develop better practices to make sure every vote possible would be counted.
The result: during the May 2022 Primary Runoff election, the rejection rate fell – from 13% to just 3% statewide, almost in line with 2020 rejection rates.
The best part? In the March primary, Democratic primary ballots were more likely to be rejected. But the opposite was true in May – Republican ballots were rejected at a higher rate than Democratic ballots.
This is what we mean when we say, yes, we can beat voter suppression. We have the tools to empower thousands of Texas voters to make their voices heard!
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But we’re not stopping there. We’re building on this work – carrying forward the lessons we learned in 2022, and growing our impact for 2024.
That’s why I’m so excited to invite you to a special event we’re having with Texas’s very own Mike Collier.
We’re going to talk about a completely revolutionary way to support voter protection and Democratic nominees 24/7/365 – and how, working together, we can beat Republicans at their own game.
We hope you’ll sign up to join our community and support this important work. Join here.
And if you want to hear more, join us on January 30th for this important event.
In solidarity,
Kim
P.S. Not free that day? We’ll miss you! But if you register, we’ll send you the recording. Or, if you’re excited about this work, sign up to join our community!
Blue Texas is a joint project of Power the Vote and Every State Blue Texas
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