History of Voter Projects
Successful social movements have long made civic engagement work part of their programs.
Then …
- Women campaigned from 1848 until 1920 to win the right to vote in this country. We remember is the Constitutional Amendment that ended the campaign, but in fact the fight was won in a series of local fights. How many know today that the first state to allow women to vote was Wyoming?
- In 1909, the NAACP launched what may be one of the first nonpartisan electoral engagement projects, the Voter Empowerment Program. The program, while no longer directly engagement in voter turnout efforts, is still active in policy work. Together with the AFL-CIO, the National Council of LaRaza and the National Organization for Women, among others, the Voter Empowerment Program campaigned for the passage in 2001 of the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act, which sought to right the wrongs of the 2000 election.
- African Americans saw winning voting rights as central to the civil rights in the movement of the 1950s and 60s. In the summer of 1964, more than a hundred primarily white college students joined forces with local activists to register nearly 2,000 African Americans in Mississippi. In protest of the Democratic Party’s all-white slate of candidates, organizers held a mock election in which 90,000 “votes” were cast. Over the course of that “Freedom Summer,” three civil rights campaigners died for the right to vote. Today there are more Black officials in the U.S. South than in any other part of the country. Winning the vote wasn’t everything, but it was an important place to start.
- Even to this day immigrant advocates must continue to fight for the language rights of non-English speakers. Congress recently reauthorized the federal Voting Rights Act, a landmark achievement of the civil rights movement which guarantees that no citizen can be barred from voting on the basis of race, color or literacy and eliminated the poll tax that prevented the poor from voting. It took a lot of community pressure to win the reauthorization of the bill. One of the community victories along the way was that thirty-one states must provide bilingual ballots for citizens who do not speak English as a first language.
… And Now
In recent years, civic participations projects have been less about voter engagement and more about registration on a large scale. National registration drives in the 2004 election season added some 4.2 million newly registered voters from minority and underrepresented constituencies to the rolls.
Most of the registration and GOTV work is carried out by field organizers, recruited and employed by national organizations, flown in to crucial districts for a short and intensive period. It’s a controversial method which Anthony Thigpenn
argues is not measurably effective because it lacks a key component: voter engagement. Furthermore, it lacks almost any element of grassroots organizing. Voter projects that are not led by members of the community cannot be sustained across elections, as Henry Serrano observes.
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