Make It Weird: Getting the Youth Vote Out
by Gail Ablow | Photography by David Jolkovski
Fun, different, approachable. An interview with the Bus Federation’s Matt Singer
In the wake of the 2016 elections, analysts often zeroed in on voter registration and turnout (or lack thereof) as key to particular outcomes in races at every level—local, state, and national. Since 2011, Carnegie Corporation of New York grantee Matt Singer and his team at the Bus Federation, along with colleagues across the country, have successfully grown an unusual network of almost 4,000 nonprofit and corporate partners, as well as 10,000 volunteers, to register hundreds of thousands of previously disaffected Americans, engaging them in voting and other aspects of the political process. Their National Voter Registration Day (NVRD) is winning nationwide attention and support. Until recently Singer served as executive director of the Bus Federation.
Last November, Singer came to the Corporation’s New York offices to discuss the Bus Federation (now known as the Alliance for Youth Action), the future of National Voter Registration Day, and his reasons for moving on to new challenges. Singer sat down with Gail Ablow, a writer and producer for Moyers & Co. and a Carnegie visiting media fellow. Here follow edited excerpts from that conversation.
GAIL ABLOW: So, what is the Bus Federation?
MATT SINGER: The Bus is a nonprofit that believes young people have the power to change the world. We try to make it a reality that young people can have their own political power. We support grassroots organizations around the country — we scale up their work, we fund it, we train them and help them while trusting them to make their own decisions in their own communities.
ABLOW: Why did you set up the Voter Registration Project?
SINGER: Much of the basic work of democracy is helping first-time folks through what a lot of us would think of as Democracy 101. We just had a presidential election, but we also voted for U.S. senators, for members of Congress, for governors, for sheriffs, for prosecutors, for county offices. In much of the country, we voted on ballot initiatives and referrals and constitutional amendments. And all of that means that the ballot can be complicated and overwhelming.
This is especially true now, with changes in the media landscape, in education, and with a huge number of immigrants who are new citizens and their children whose cultural education reflects a very different notion of democratic participation. And those different views come up as folks try to figure out the various ways they can have a voice.
Some people feel like the presidential race doesn’t really affect them, or that the Electoral College means their vote maybe doesn’t count. People don’t know where to vote, they don’t know what to do with the mail ballot they got, or maybe they didn’t return it. Does that stop them from being able to vote now? And what about their ID? They have one from out of state, or it’s expired, or it’s got the wrong address.
Much of this project is figuring out — in 50 states and over 3,000 counties — how to help each individual eligible voter change their perceptions of what voting actually is: from voting being a thing they can theoretically do — to voting being a thing that they are excited to do, that they are prepared to do, that they are informed about and confident about.
That happens best, generally, through a series of one-on-one conversations. And it’s the same conversation over and over and over again. And at the end we have thousands more or millions more voters.
ABLOW: Is it only about national elections?
SINGER: No. In this last election, a lot of the hottest conversations in the country were about local prosecutors’ races, about law enforcement questions, or governors or state legislatures, or even state Supreme Court members, and also ballot measures. People are figuring out what it is that they care most about. People have real power in local elections, and they can see it in action. We know that local elections don’t see high turnout generally, but more and more young people are saying that’s the place where you actually can make a difference.
ABLOW: Can you give some examples?
SINGER: We were working with a group in Chicago called Chicago Votes, one of a handful of youth-led organizations that were incredibly active. Two years ago, young black-led organizations started raising attention around Anita Alvarez, the prosecutor in Cook County, the second largest county in the United States. She was controversial because of her handling of police violence, juvenile justice, mass incarceration, and so on. So, two candidates filed to run against her, and the result was an incredibly high turnout in the Democratic primary. We were working with leaders on the ground who were registering and turning out voters. The conversation was, “Hey, have you encountered our justice system? Do you know people who have? Well, here’s a way you can make a difference in that.”
One of the conversations we were having in Colorado this year was on campus: “Do you care what your tuition is? Well, you get to vote for the Colorado University regent, one of five regents who set the tuition every year. That’s within your power.” And people’s eyes would light up. “Oh, I didn’t know I could do that.”
“We’re still putting numbers together, but in 2016, on Twitter alone, we counted over 350 million tweets that referenced voter registration that day, September 27. And more than 770,000 people actually registered, including 125,000 who filled out paper forms with a volunteer. We had 10,000 volunteers around the country working with 3,500 nonprofit organizations to help voters register.”
— Matt Singer
So, yes, we find the local stuff often is more motivating. The issue is just finding the resources and time and energy to spread the word so people know it’s happening.
ABLOW: So does it take a lot of preparation?
SINGER: Our first real planning meeting for this election was, I think, New Year’s Eve 2014.
ABLOW: Describe how it worked.
SINGER: We set goals for how many folks we wanted to register to vote, how many we wanted to give information about where their polling places were, what sort of ID they need to bring, what’s on their ballot. We set those goals state by state with our local partners, through rounds of back and forth.
We set the big strategies: What is going to authentically connect with these young people? What is the conversation in our community? What are the issues people are feeling, and what do the people on the ballot have to do with those issues?
There’s often a desire to tell nonvoters, “You should vote because of Issue X.” But the reason that person’s not a voter, even if they care about Issue X, is they don’t understand the connection between this issue and the choices they have on the ballot. So our job is to help people navigate that so they can say, “I care about these issues and I’m now well-informed enough to make this decision.”
The goal is democracy. We help voters find their own self-interest and then help them pursue it, and all that gets added up in the election to show a collective decision. It’s not that we tell voters what they should be doing.
The second thing we do: just removing the barriers. Maybe you didn’t grow up in a family where your parents talked about voting, maybe they didn’t vote, maybe they couldn’t vote, maybe they just didn’t ever talk to you about it. With civics education in decline in schools, where are you going to learn how to register to vote? Where are you going to learn that you even need to register? And why are you expected to know something that no one will ever tell you?
So we try to reach people with the basic message, “Yes, you need to register to vote. It’s simple, it’s easy, and — increasingly — it’s online. You can do it in several dozen states on the Internet now, and everywhere else you can find a place. You can print a form, or you can go to your county clerk’s office, or you can find one of our volunteers.”
And then, finally, young people are struggling at times with the notion of whether or not their votes make a difference, especially in these large presidential elections. So we’ve been finding and retelling recent examples where young people have registered and voted in large numbers and something has happened as a result — an election outcome has changed and the community has changed.
Like the way young people in Chicago protested, they also voted, and now they have a new prosecutor. The new prosecutor wants to focus on early interventions, programs that change the dynamics so that fewer people are being incarcerated. They’re not going to use criminalization as a response to acting up in school now. Sometimes students just do act up in school. That’s part of being a child. So they’re not going to punish that, or certainly not within our juvenile justice system. Someone’s going to get suspended for an hour, or have to go talk to the principal, or sit in the corner — it’s about appropriate responses. And if that is possible in Cook County, with millions of people, it’s possible for young people to affect the outcome anywhere in the country on any issue they care about.
ABLOW: Are there other examples?
SINGER: Yeah. Young voters in Boulder, Colorado, in 2011, kept saying to their energy utility Xcel, “Hey, can we get most of our energy from clean sources?” A majority of their energy was coming from fossil fuels, specifically from coal. Xcel said, “We think that this is the right mix for our energy portfolio — so, no.”
The city council responded by putting two measures on the ballot to move the city off of coal entirely. Young people ended up running the campaign to pass that measure. They raised and spent about $100,000 while Xcel Energy spent over a million dollars to oppose it. But the young people ended up winning by several hundred votes out of tens of thousands cast.
Xcel Energy came back to the issue in 2013 and tried to convince the voters to reverse their decision. Outspent the young people again, this time two to one. But young people ended up winning again. Then the city said, “Look, maybe some of us didn’t side with you the first time, but we made a decision, and it’s time for us to move on.” And so now Boulder is in the process of shifting to much cleaner energy.
There are other examples. In Seattle, Washington, and Phoenix, Arizona, voters recently passed very significant expansions of their transportation systems — new buses, new light rail. In Portland, Oregon, we just passed a new affordable housing measure, and we’re seeing these kinds of measures starting to move into major cities around the country where we have this problem of the influx of money from the outside. In Portland, it’s about San Francisco Bay Area money coming in. People are getting priced out of the housing market in the Bay Area, so that money is invading Portland, and people are getting priced out of their homes there.
How do we deal with that? One tangible thing we can do is to pass an affordable housing measure. By doing that, we engage new people in the process, which is great, and we win a policy victory. We also send a signal to political leaders that this is an issue that people care about, that they will show up for it, and that if they stand with us, we can stand with them.
When politicians are making decisions, they base them on assumptions about who the electorate is. So we have to build a younger, more diverse, more representative electorate so that politicians think about everyone they represent, not just the people they think are voting right now.
ABLOW: Does that mean young voters are much more inclined to get involved on tangible issues that affect them directly, and the presidential candidates just seemed too disconnected?
SINGER: There was definitely a lot of frustration about this presidential election among young folks. But once they showed up to cast a ballot for whatever reason, most of them did vote in the presidential election. There were a lot of write-ins, a lot of folks left it blank, a lot voted third party, but the vast majority still chose a presidential candidate. That’s a reality that we sometimes overlook: voting is sometimes about enthusiasm, but if the enthusiasm can be found somewhere on the ballot, a voter will make a choice in every contest where they feel informed.
The question is: how do we help people feel well enough informed to make a choice? Even if in some cases that choice will be a protest vote or a write-in or a joke. Because once someone casts that ballot, the majority of contests are going to be filled in.
People generally feel they know enough about the presidential race. But how do we help people figure out what’s going on in a state treasurer’s race or in the local soil and water conservation district? I’ll be honest: I don’t really understand what those districts do either. But we hear from young people that they get the ballot, they see 40 contests on it, and they say, “I don’t know what all these things are.”
So I say, “I work in this full time and I don’t know what all of these are either, but that’s okay! Vote! Vote where you’re confident; don’t vote where you’re not. You’re not going to get in trouble for leaving a space blank. You can fill in one race. You can leave your whole ballot blank if you want to. That’s up to you. In fact, a blank ballot can be a message to the politicians about their constituency.”
ABLOW: Tell me about your most successful strategies.
SINGER: We realized six or eight years ago that the media landscape was changing radically: local newspapers, TV, radio declining, versus social media, national news sites, fake news sites — so much information crosses geographical boundaries in a way that it didn’t a generation ago. So on some things, we very much do not want to segment our messages city by city, even though so much of what’s interesting is often local.
One reason we started the National Voter Registration Day was that registration deadlines vary from state to state. Voter registration rules aren’t built for this new media environment that goes across state lines, so people get confused. But if we have a single national holiday, we can align a bunch of messages and maybe reach people who aren’t following these discussions all the time.
We’re still putting numbers together, but in 2016, on Twitter alone, we counted over 350 million tweets that referenced voter registration that day, September 27. And more than 770,000 people actually registered, including 125,000 who filled out paper forms with a volunteer. We had 10,000 volunteers around the country working with 3,500 nonprofit organizations to help voters register.
Now, how do we build this into a giant megaphone? We work directly with folks on the ground and we’ve built this network. Now we’re in nine states, but we work with other organizations in all 50, and we try to help them do a better job talking to people in their communities. What is on our ballot this year, who are these people, what do they do, what is the office, and why does this vote matter? Those conversations are the modern equivalent of water-cooler conversations.
The final thing is making it weird. We’ve got to get people’s attention. One of our favorite photos was in Colorado on election day, a young voter wearing a vote-bot costume, dressed up as a robot, dancing in the foreground while someone dressed up like Santa is talking to a voter. Food was being given away to get people to swing by the table, and there’s a sign in the back that misspells the word “burritos.” It looks like a mess, but that organization helped register 50,000 people to vote this year and turned out record numbers of young people in Colorado.
So, the lesson is we’ve got to be fun, we’ve got to be different, we’ve got to be approachable. People get so intimidated by our democratic systems that if we look, you know, professorial, they’re not going to come talk to us. If we look goofy and dumb, then there’s no way someone will feel like an idiot in conversation with us. So we do a lot to break down the barriers.
ABLOW: Now tell me about National Voter Registration Day itself. How did it start?
SINGER: This year, September 27, 2016, was the fifth National Voter Registration Day. It came out of a conversation in early 2011 with Andy Bernstein, who runs a great organization here in New York called HeadCount. He was working with Eddy Morales (who at the time was at Voto Latino), and we were looking at data that said six million people missed the 2008 election because they did not know how to register to vote or they missed a deadline. And that was the moment. We saw that we needed to make sure everyone knew how to do that for 2012, that everyone knew when the deadlines are, that people have that opportunity.
And when we looked at what it would cost — well, in an election year, partisan campaigns will spend $10 billion. Only $50–100 million gets spent in all 50 states on nonpartisan campaigns reminding people to register to vote. That may sound like a lot of money, but it’s nothing more than a rounding error in something like Coca-Cola’s marketing budget.
We also thought that we want to start a national thing, a unifying thing. After all, democracy is one of the things we should celebrate as a country. Even though election years are fraught and people are anxious and tense and families get in fights and Thanksgivings can be awkward for many of us, it’s still great that ultimately the choice is with us. Why don’t we celebrate that in a unifying way?
Then we said, “Let’s not start a new organization or try to do this through one vehicle. Let’s mobilize the thousands of organizations and the thousands of people who already want to do stuff, partnering with as many people as possible.”
So by the end of 2011, when we called ourselves the Bus Federation, because of how we mostly got around, we started recruiting partners, we set a date, and just started saying, “Hey, this is going to be National Voter Registration Day — can you do something?” We built the list and pretty soon we had a hundred partners, and we were feeling pretty good about that — some big organizations and some large networks. Then we went through this period where people start to naysay, and it feels like the momentum is gone, two or three months of just absolute slog. And then in early August, it was like a switch flipped.
All of a sudden, we started getting lots of sign-ups, and we ended up with over 1,200 partners and a bunch of activations that we didn’t even know were going to happen. We ended up registering about 300,000 people to vote that year. That was about three times what we had hoped for.
So we came away from 2012 with a conversation of should we do this again? Should we wait until 2016? Should we do it in 2014? If we’re going to do it in 2014, we’re going to have to start in 2013 anyway, so why not make this an annual tradition? That would clarify that this isn’t about any specific election, and it’s not about any specific geography or any party or any one community. It’s about all of us, and it’s about every eligible voter getting this reminder every year. So I think the fact that we did these every year for the last four years has made a big difference.
For 2016 we started early and ended up with nearly 4,000 partners all over the country, and 10,000 volunteers. Google did their first-ever voter registration doodle on their home page the day before our day, and they drove an incredible amount of traffic. Tumblr integrated with over 100,000 blogs hosted on their site, all of them encouraging people to register to vote that day. Univision did a daylong takeover on air. MTV brought back the Total Request Live countdown, making it Total Registration Live, which was a dream come true for folks like me who are children of the ’90s. Plus secretaries of state from all over the country came on board — Republicans, Democrats, with huge activations in their own states. For National Voter Registration Day 2016, we’re looking at final numbers of more than 770,000 people who registered to vote that day.
And it all happened because each of these organizations really got to own it, got to take credit for their numbers, got to be an important thing in their community. Over time, we have learned that the key to building community infrastructure around the country is to root it in place and also to tie it into a national conversation. And given the changes in the media landscape that we talked about, that’s where the future of organizing is — taking a vibrant national conversation and making it relevant to each community.
ABLOW: What feedback did you get from your corporate partners?
SINGER: They were really excited for the election this year, thanks to the bipartisan involvement of the secretaries of state and the fact that National Voter Registration Day happened in all 50 states. The day wasn’t about any one specific community. We produced material in five languages and offered online voter registration in 12 languages, and we also worked with home schooling associations. It’s about making sure that every eligible voter is reached, and I think that message speaks to folks looking through a corporate social responsibility lens. They also want to reach every customer they can. So the feedback from businesses this year was incredible: they had a great experience and saw a positive response from their customers and from their communities.
We did some work with Facebook, but they mostly mobilized outside of us, and they registered over 625,000 people in the four days leading up to NVRD. Things like that are game-changing. And the flip side of this, which we heard explicitly from Google and Tumblr and Twitter and other partners, is that they love these hundreds and thousands of local community events happening all over the country. Even if they’re not all explicitly tied together, there’s this feeling that we are all in on this together, we’re one nation and we’re taking action together today.
ABLOW: And everybody’s got the same goal, which is to register, versus actually voting on election day — when, naturally, people are more divided.
SINGER: Yeah. National Voter Registration Day this year fell on the day after the first presidential debate, when the entire country was realizing, “Oh, wow, there are two very different visions of this country.” And then voters overall were saying, “We don’t really like either of these candidates.” Then to be able to pivot into a positive thing, a unifying thing, an inclusive thing was, I think, really healthy.
Now we’re excited for the next four years about how do we build these institutions that help everyone come into the process and see that we are stronger when we all work together. We’ll find stuff that cuts across party lines and says, “No matter what you believe, if you’re eligible, you should get registered, you should turn out, write your letter to Congress, be an active citizen.”
ABLOW: So back up and tell me how you got involved in this Bus Project and what lessons you’re going to take with you now that you are leaving.
SINGER: I grew up in Montana, and my father used to manage congressional campaigns before I was born, so it was one of those families where people are active and discuss politics and current events around the dinner table. My parents brought me into the voting booth when I was a little kid, and I saw them cast ballots, and watched them disagree about who they were going to vote for. So, I got these ideas that: 1) we do all engage; 2) we sometimes disagree (and that’s okay); and 3) we get to an outcome, and we move forward. And so I’ll always have that.
In my late teens, I had to drop out of school for financial reasons and I worked as a short-order line cook for a summer. Then I volunteered at a civic organization, Montana Conservation Voters, and they hired me as an organizer. We were told young people don’t vote so it’s not worth our time to talk to them, but I kept seeing all of these young people with incredible energy and visions of the things they wanted to do in their city and in their state, but didn’t have a vehicle for channeling that energy. So about a dozen of us in our early twenties started an organization called Forward Montana.
One of our friends had just come back from Iraq. We helped him run for the state legislature, and he defeated the chair of the county party in the primary, won the general election, and served two terms. We started building issue campaigns. We remade the State Board of Higher Ed. We passed a couple of bills fixing how minors were being treated when reporting sexual assaults (young women would no longer be penalized for underage drinking when they reported assaults). We figured out over time how to have employees and a real budget, and began working with folks in other states — the Bus Project in Oregon, the Washington Bus, and Numero in Colorado. After a few years, the four groups formed this network and I moved to Oregon to run it.
Now we’re in nine states full time. We’ve launched National Voter Registration Day and have some other significant programs. We plan to expand to more states and help more youth organizations take root and build and prosper. So we changed our name to Alliance for Youth Action to reflect our new focus on young people. And the Nonprofit VOTE group will be managing the registration day from now on.
Anyway, it’s been ten years for me, and new leaders should be given space. So I don’t know what I’m doing next, but I’m excited for where this organization’s going to go.
ABLOW: What’s your advice to others who want to build a movement?
SINGER: Before I try to offer wisdom, I need to sit back and listen and learn, because young people know things that we don’t. The people out there on the streets these days are about to teach us something and I want to see what it is.
ABLOW: Fair enough. What are some tools you might recommend to those people in the streets?
SINGER: Listening is a big one. The most important tools of organizing are really simple: a sheet of paper, a pen, get people’s contact info, a cup of coffee or tea. Sit down, spend time together, learn about one another, build relationships. I have yet to see people who don’t have deep relationships ever move anyone or change someone’s mind or create an effective call to real action. If you want to do those things, find a way to build a relationship.
A lot of what we’ve done was built on Google Docs and on spreadsheets, or other essentially free technology. Text messaging and Gchat, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat — just use the mechanisms you already use to communicate with your peers. Every two or three years, there’s going to be a new social media mechanism and a new app for it. Then just think about how you would throw a party and that’s how you organize an event. It’s whatever works in your community.
Every year we get asked what is our favorite technology, and we say clipboards — because they allow you to write on a piece of paper when you’re walking around. You can use a piece of cardboard with a rubber band at the top. You can make all this stuff so cheap, so easy, so accessible.
ABLOW: In the 2016 election you had hoped for a bigger youth turnout at the polls — or are you satisfied with what you saw?
SINGER: Well, we always want to see higher turnout. It goes up when people think politics and elections are relevant to their lives, when they have the time to focus on it and feel social pressure to do it. We won’t be happy until it’s a hundred percent! But I would say we are a little disappointed. We are frustrated that we continue to have a political system that is not figuring out how to engage everyone. So we have work to do. We’ve got to get better in engaging the folks in our communities, helping them learn how to run for office themselves and have the networks to be viable.
We’ve got to do better at finding ways to put things on ballots if politicians won’t put the right bills up in legislatures. How do we tackle the issues we care about — housing and transportation and climate change and immigration? And what happens to our economy? If we don’t have answers for people, then it’s not insane that they don’t vote. So don’t be disappointed in the people. Try to figure out what we can do better.
