How Equity Centered Design Can Put Voter Mobilization into Overdrive — A Case Study of Fair Count
Chelsea N. Jones, PhD, MPP
The 2022 midterm elections represented a critical juncture for Georgia residents, as the first election since the passing of “The Election Integrity Act of 2021.” The bill includes several provisions known to add disproportionate burdens on voters of color. Election data shows that though gaps in voter turnout between Black and white GA voters worsened, Black voter turnout persisted despite the bill’s many restrictive provisions.
One possible explanation for this contradiction of high Black political engagement in a state with strict voting laws, is the mobilization efforts of organizers on-the-ground. To investigate this, I conducted a case study of a prominent mobilizing institution, working to build and sustain political power in Georgia, Fair Count. The organization was established in 2019 as a non-partisan, non-profit aimed at increasing representation in the U.S. Census. Fair Count sees the Census as the starting point for the equitable distribution of resources, and a key to politically empowering people of color in the rural, deep south.
Fair Count’s endeavors are person-centered, as their focus is on connecting with marginalized communities through impassioned, personal methods of engagement, making their efforts unique from that of conventional political institutions. In practice, the organization’s mode of operation mirrors Equity Centered Design (EDC), a unique approach to inclusivity coined by RAND’s Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy (CAREP).
Equity Centered Design is an Intentional Pursuit of Affected Voices
Equity Centered Design is “the practice of purposefully involving diverse communities throughout a design process with the goal of allowing their voice to directly affect how the solution will address the inequity at hand.” In its essence, ECD is an effort to center underrepresented communities, not simply by providing services for them but, by engaging them in the development of those services and strategies.
This approach combines the concepts of equity, anti-racism and Human Centered Design to encourage organizations and researchers not to assume the needs or perspectives of their target audience. ECD is an acknowledgment of the fact that many non-profits have a target audience of marginalized communities, however, well-meaning efforts to engage their audience can be easily overridden without intentional involvement of the impacted community.
Fair Count’s Principles in Practice
I interviewed four members of Fair Count’s staff to discuss the strategy undergirding their mobilization initiatives prior to and following the 2022 midterm elections. Interviews revealed that racial equity was not simply an aspiration, but was the core component of their vision, which led them to focus on Georgia residents with the fewest social and political resources. The staff noted that while much of the public attention in Georgia is focused on urban city-centers like Atlanta, residents of rural counties have long-standing needs that extend well-beyond the months leading up to a major election.
Rural counties in Georgia are severely impacted by the digital divide. Residents in these areas still lack wide-spread access to broadband internet, and reliable cell-service, which impacts their access to online only resources and government services — including the 2020 census and many voter outreach efforts. Though not a part of their original mission, Fair Count embarked on a pilot program to install internet hotspots in churches and other community hubs throughout these counties.
Identifying this need was a product of Fair Count’s staff being deeply embedded in their service areas, through a process they call non-extractive organizing. The organization has made a practice of hiring individuals who live in or are from their service regions, as organizing staff.
The goal is to invert the typical mobilization process where an outside organization enters a community prior to an election, meets and engages with its residents and retreats after hitting a political milestone. Instead, Fair Count’s organizing staff are trusted community members, who maintain engagement year-round, not only as their job but as a part of their own lifestyle. This structure gives organizers a personal understanding of the issues, concerns and opportunities in a given community.
Fair Count believes that this process increases the effectiveness of their programs by allowing community members to establish contact with organizers in informal settings and express needs that ultimately shape the organization’s programming. Most importantly, Fair Count staff believes that this type of engagement helps reduce voter apathy, which has been fostered over generations by patterns of exploitative mobilization tactics in communities of color.
Utilizing Community Based Participatory Research to Mobilize Hard-to-Reach Populations
Fair Count’s concept of non-extractive organizing closely follows the model of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), a method utilized in public health to build and maintain trust between community members and researchers. CBPR works by recruiting community members to address the issues that affect them, using their own knowledge of the issue and personal application of an intervention. Fair Count’s staff notes that an essential part of their work is simply listening to rural residents. As noted by an organizer:
“[My committee and I] often talk about listening as much, and a lot of times more, than we’re talking, [in order to] understand what some of the issues are that [community members] want to see resolved. You know, when we go into meetings, we realize that the first thing that needs to come out of our mouths may not be anything. It may just be that we sit down and listen first, or we throw out a question first, and then just listen to their responses. And then from there, we’re able to connect the dots, but connect them realistically, right?”
To do so, they have designed programs that create spaces for people to speak transparently about the state of their community, their anticipation or apprehensions toward civic engagement and the specific ways that they conceptualize American public affairs.
One mode of facilitating this type of dialogue are gender-based programs such as Black Men Count. Black Men Count was birthed as a complete count committee to increase census participation among Black males but has since become a tool for voter engagement and a framework for better understanding subgroups within the demographic. According to Fair Count staff, Black men are often viewed as monolith, represented by the prototypical middle-class, formally educated male, leaving men who don’t fit this archetype disengaged and underrepresented.
They address this through a wide range of programs that attach collegial activities to political skill development. Programs like their basketball tournament, which borrowed the slogan “No Workshop, No Jumpshot,” urged young Black men to participate in discussions about the importance of voter registration, ballot initiatives and other elements of their local elections.
Through these sessions, Fair Count staff help voters construct their own policy agenda by connecting the dots between their everyday experience and the political factors underlying those outcomes. This rare, one-on-one style of canvassing is a mutual exchange where voters gain motivation to participate and Fair Count gains information that sharpens the delivery of their services and resources.
Empathy is a Key Ingredient of Equity Centered Design
Literature on Community Based Participatory Research demonstrates the importance of building interpersonal connections when engaging communities of color. However, Fair Count’s work pushes the boundaries of this framework, by engaging with a key tool of Human Centered Design, empathy.
Empathy is often excluded from conversations on voter mobilization, despite it being a common thread among community-based organizations. Empathy produces a productive attachment between a mobilizing organization and their community, by urging the organization to take on the community’s perspective, burdens, and successes. This translates to more effective operations, by making an organization’s work more precise and meaningful to those they serve.
For staff of Fair Count, incorporating empathy in their practices often results in hands-on, laborious voter engagement, that many organizations shy away from. For instance, in the 2020 election, the staff became aware of misinformation disseminated on a local radio station, directing a large proportion of voters to the wrong polling location. Fair Count staff stepped in, relocated to that precinct, and worked with individual voters to help them locate their designated polling place.
Efforts like this are uncommon among many large political organizations, largely because they require a level of patience, understanding and will-power that is best accessed through empathy.
Employing Cultural Originality to Disrupt Traditional Voter Engagement
Intentionality is the overarching element directing Fair Count’s activities. The staff note that the organization is structed (and restructured) in ways that foster originality and organic ideas.
While the vast majority of African Americans are expected to code-switch or neutralize their natural approach in their work setting, Fair Count staff note that their heritage is celebrated and seen as a strength in their line of work. Employees are encouraged to develop ideas that are true to their own culture, which the staff believes is an asset in building trust among voters. According to another staff member:
“I think we do a great job of allowing our characteristics and our personality to be a genuine part of the work, that I think that really contributes to kind of bridging [the gap between organizers and the community] … A lot of times, you have some people come to the community, they’ll do the work that needs to be done. But it’s like, they may not always connect, because of maybe how they’re doing it, or the language that they’re using. We try to be very deliberate about what’s going to be the most effective way to connect with people. Just being us being us, being ourselves, being genuine, being everything. And I think that language is a huge part of that.”
Fair Count staff recognizes that even by employing their true personality, organic ideas, and personal knowledge of the community they serve, not all of their initiatives have the impact they intend. They stress the importance of maintaining a nimble, flexible mode of operations, that can pivot when inevitable conflicts arise and when residents do not respond well to a message or program.
Reflections from the Fair Count staff make it clear that the pursuit of racial equity in civic engagement is not easy or simple. However, the groundbreaking outcomes from the 2022 elections reflect the benefits of these efforts.
Today, racial representation in US politics is still an aspiration not yet achieved. Only about a quarter of the members of the 118th Congress and eight percent of US governors are people of color, despite nearly 40% of the population being nonwhite. Fair Count’s example of Equity Centered Design provides campaigns and candidates with a road map on how to change these statistics through the effective engagement of underrepresented voters.
In order to make meaningful change in our political landscape, it is imperative that campaigns, candidates and policy makers take note of Fair Count’s approach and 1) Involve underrepresented people in the design of their policy solutions, 2) Commit to long-term, non-exploitative relationship building with under-resourced communities and 3) Hire, empower and listen to members of these target communities, especially those with intersecting, traditionally marginalized identities. To target the root of the issue of underrepresentation, it is critically important that campaigns, candidates and policy makers also support the passing of legislation that expands and protects voting rights for all Americans.
Rogers, R. (2021). The RAND Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy DEIJ Statement [Unpublished manuscript]. Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy, RAND Corporation.
Chelsea N. Jones, PhD, MPP
Voting Rights Fellow
University of California, Los Angeles
