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When people with pro-family values are informed about the issues and registered to vote, boy
do they ever turn out! We have some encouraging insights for you. This is the CitizenLink Report.
Hi, I'm Stuart Shepard along with Carrie Gordon Earll who watches over our analyst team.
Hi Carrie.
Hi Stuart.
Let's talk about the voter registration project.
Well Focus on the Family embarked on a voter registration project last year that has turned
out to be pretty historical. Now a truism in elections is it's all about the math. Whichever
candidate, whichever ballot issue gets the most votes that's who wins. And that's why
voter registration is so important. According to US Census Bureau 29 percent of citizens
were not registered to vote in 2008. That means about 60 million people didn't vote.
Wow.
Now of that more than a third of eligible voting citizens didn't vote in the 2008 presidential
election. That's a lot of people that are staying home and we were curious to know how
many of those folks that were not registered were aligned or connected in some way with
pro-family, pro-life groups like Focus on the Family. So we teamed up with some of our
friends and we looked at our lists and identified people through secretary of state sites to
find out who was not registered and we got ahold of them and it was very interesting.
We were a little surprised at how many were not registered to be honest.
We were and I think what happens is people may sign up for Focus on the Family or CitizenLink
in our emails or watch the webcast and they get good information but it doesn't necessarily
connect to am I registered to vote, am I an informed voter, am I an active voter, so we
were interested to get as many of these folks registered as possible.
And we had some big goals in mind.
We did. Now we had five partners we worked with -- we want to give them credit because
they worked really *** this. 1) American Principles Project, 2) Americans United for Life
3) Family Research Council, 4) Susan B. Anthony List Education Fund and
(5) National Right to Life Education Fund. So that's a mix of social conservative groups that
have been involved and this really was the largest collaborative effort of voter registration
in the modern pro-family history, so we were really excited.
Let's talk about those goals. We set some large goals and it was -- it was not clear
if we were going to hit them. Well that's the deal with goals is you don't
know. You hope that it's going to go well. We had hoped that one in five of the folks
that we contacted would register and it turned out that that happened. Our goal was to reach
5 million unregistered pro-family Americans. That was our goal to do that. To get 35% of
those registered and to have 70% of those folks go vote. So we had some lofty goals
and worked hard to try to achieve them.
And there was some bumps along the way as you would expect for the project of this magnitude,
but the outcome was incredibly encouraging.
It really was. If you can imagine a mailing with 5 million pieces, that's the largest
one I think that we've ever attempted here. But the outcome was very heartening.
What we found was that out of the 5 million that we mailed to..
Which is to say we did reach our goal of contacting 5 million.
We did -- there are 5 million folks that got a mailing from this collaborative effort.
And out of that?
And out of that 1.5 million registered that were not registered so that's 32% of the folks
that we contacted and that hit our one in five goal roughly there. Now it's really interesting
is out of those folks that registered, more than 71% -- over 1 million people voted who
would not have voted. So that's a lot.
Let's put that percentage into context. How does that compare to the typical turnout in
a state across the country or other races that we looked at?
Well every state will have a different average -- a different place where it compares to
the national average but what we found in key states where we reached out to folks -- said
hey you're not registered, do you want to register? They said yeah I do -- they registered
with the secretary of state then we were able to back and confirm they voted. In key states
those folks voted almost 10% higher than the national average in their state. So what that
tells us is the people were motivated -- it just needed to move to the next level.
So let's summarize that: We contacted 5 million people. Out of that about a third -- 32% actually
registered to vote and out of that well over a million actually went to the poles at a
great rate than the regular population.
Not all of that million but part of that million did and again it gets into state numbers.
But what we saw is when people have access -- when you make it easy for them and hey
we're all busy, you make it easy for me I'm more likely to do something too, that when
they were notified that you're not registered -- we can help you get registered -- then
they were very motivated to vote so that's highly encouraging.
And particularly motivated by the social issues that we talk about on this program all the time.
Yeah. Because these are folks that are already connected to those six partners including Focus
on the Family. So we know there are people that get our e-mails or get our literature
or go to our website, watch our webcast and we just want to make sure our own faithful
are registered. So through the Focus on the Family voter registration 2012 campaign, we
were able to register 1.5 million voters and more than a million of those that would not
have voted otherwise did show up so I think that's a really good model for where we can
go in the future.
Now an experience like this is something to go through. What have we learned from it that
we can apply toward the future?
Well we learned it's a big effort and I think we would do some backend things differently
this next time. But what we learned is that people do want to be engaged. The whole purpose of
living in a country where we the people have a vote and have a voice is to have people
engaged and through the years I know it's easy to get discouraged -- it's easy to say
my vote doesn't matter, but we've seen too many cases Stuart where a race has been decided
by a couple thousand or at a local level even a couple hundred votes so your vote does matter.
Even so it is really our responsibility as citizens and as believers in this country
to be salt and light and to be engaged. So what this has done is really encouraged us
to continue to carry that mantle and have that message of encouraging people to be engaged
in the process and we'll continue to do that.
Yeah and it sounds like you've already said we're going to do this again in the future.
We are. We are looking at 2014. 2013 is not an election year but we're look at what we
could piggy back on for 2014 and we'll come back and share that with folks here on the
CitizenLink Report.
Alright, very good. Carrie, thank you for those insights -- that's encouraging.
Thank you, Stuart.
And thank you for watching. We hope you were heartened by that as well. We always love
hearing from you. You may write to us at Mail@CitizenLink dot com. Remember to pray for people around
the country who are not registered to vote who share our values on the social issues.
Pray that they would have a moment of realization that they need to get registered -- that they
need to fill out the little cards so that they can vote in the upcoming elections as
we look down the road.
And remember: Stand Tall and Be Heard!