Charities Bask in Record Voter-Turnout Numbers, Weigh Next Steps

The vote is in: Charity and foundation efforts to get people to the polls for this month’s presidential election were a success.

So say many nonprofit officials who credit an unprecedented amount of philanthropic money and activity aimed at voter registration and mobilization for helping lead millions to the polls to cast their ballots this year. As many as 121 million Americans voted in this month’s election, up by about 15 million from the last presidential race four years ago. Roughly three out of every five people eligible to vote did so, the largest voter turnout since the 1960s.

But attempts to measure cause and effect are only just beginning, and opinions vary about how much charity voter drives may have been responsible for the surge.

Mark Ritchie, national coordinator for National Voice, a coalition that served the roughly 1,200 nonprofit groups that worked on nonpartisan voter programs this year, estimates that these organizations spent at least $50-million and were responsible for signing up more than four million new voters, and getting even more to the polls. “The nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort this year was somewhere around 10 times larger than ever before,” he says.

Many charity leaders say efforts to rally young people were also successful. An estimated 1.8 million more people ages 18 to 24 voted this year than in 2000, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, an organization supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. But the center also found that young Americans’ share of the total vote stayed about the same as four years ago — roughly 9 percent — raising questions about just how significant the increased turnout was.

Link Unclear

In much the same way, determining just how much of an effect nonprofit efforts had on voter turnout remains a fuzzy science at best. Election observers say other factors, such as intense views about the war in Iraq and the extreme closeness of the previous presidential election, probably contributed to higher-than-usual turnout.

“How much of the turnout can be attributed to mobilization efforts and how much can be attributed to motivated voters?” says Michael P. McDonald, an assistant professor at George Mason University who collects and studies election and demographic data, in an e-mail message.

Charities with specific plans for trying to quantify how their work translated into votes say much of their analysis won’t be complete until next summer, when the Census Bureau’s election data are scheduled to be available. Many charities plan to compare those data with state and local records and their own voter and member files to determine exactly how effective their get-out-the-vote efforts were. But parsing the results may be difficult — particularly trying to gauge the relative impact of voter drives conducted by charities, those conducted by the so-called 527 political groups, and those conducted by the political parties themselves.

Keeping Momentum

Even without hard numbers, many nonprofit groups are feeling flush following their voter drives and are searching for ways to keep the momentum going.

“The idea was to make the first easy connection between young people and public-policy making,” says Ivan Frishberg, outreach and development coordinator for the $9-million New Voters Project, which signed up nearly a quarter of a million 18-to-24-year-olds in six states. “Now we have to see how to keep young people engaged.”

Some nonprofit officials say the success of their get-out-the-vote efforts will give them added clout as they try to get politicians to pay more attention to the issues they support.

Robert Cudahy, president of the Westside Citizens’ Organization, a neighborhood group in St. Paul, says the organization intends to parlay the increase in voter turnout in the Westside area this election — an estimated 20-percentage-point increase from 2000 — into more involvement in the city’s mayoral race next summer.

“It’s now our job to show our residents that once they vote, politicians will listen, and on the local issues — schools, development — we have a lot to say,” says Mr. Cudahy.

But William A. Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, cautions charities against equating civic engagement with lobbying.

“We all welcome greater voter turnout,” he says. “But my concern is that the sector’s voter-mobilization effort was premised on the argument that volunteering and delivering services aren’t enough, and that the sector needs to become much more involved in public policy in order to accomplish ‘real social change.’ When the sector denigrates volunteerism and service in the name of political participation, it’s selling its birthright for a mess of pottage.” Some nonprofit groups see an opportunity now to cultivate potential new volunteers and supporters from among the people they may have touched during voter drives.

Says Libby Hill Smith, development director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, in Knoxville, Tenn.: “If we see that someone responded to an e-mailed reminder to vote, by going on our Web site or signing up for advocacy work, then we might consider making a strategic appeal to that person to stay involved, to volunteer, to contribute.”

Foundation Role

Just as charities are mulling their next move, so are many of the grant makers that gave money this year to voter registration and mobilization efforts. Foundation officials say they are stepping back to assess those efforts, and to determine how they might continue to support projects meant to enhance civic participation.

“The donor community is interested not just in the act of voting that took place on November 2, but also whether we can translate that activity into more intensive efforts to engage new voters, all voters, into our civic culture,” says Michael Caudell-Feagan, a program director at the Proteus Fund, in Washington, which one year ago helped to create the Voter Engagement Donor Network.

Mr. Caudell-Feagan says that about 130 foundations and individual donors used the network’s occasional gatherings and monthly conference calls to share information about grant making for voter-related projects. The network is planning a spring conference, he says, to figure out the next step.

In similar efforts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in Miami, is helping to arrange a meeting next month to discuss ways to support improvements in how elections are administered, such as better training for election workers. And the Beldon Fund, in New York, is talking with other grant makers about a project it has informally dubbed November 3. Beldon and others want grant makers to consider providing money to charities so they can keep on their staffs some of the many new employees who helped run the voter programs, and who now could work on broader civic-participation programs.

Rebecca W. Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which paid for the New Voters Project, says Pew is considering sponsoring new surveys and maybe a series of conferences to identify and study the public-policy issues most important to young people.

“You can’t turn the spigot on and off,” she says. “We want to uncover and examine these issues while they are still front and center for the young people who went to the polls.”

Future Votes

Some nonprofit officials are starting to look ahead to future elections. Liberty Hill Foundation, in Santa Monica, Calif., plans to build on the project it started earlier this year called LibertyVote!, in which it gave as much as $20,000 each to 11 local charities working to register and mobilize voters for the presidential election. Now, says Kafi Watlington-MacLeod, campaign manager for LibertyVote!: “We have a mayoral election in Los Angeles in March, so it is time to keep going.”

Technology tested by some charities during this past election may prove useful for a variety of future projects.

Winnett Hagens, executive director of Democracy South, an advocacy group in Carrboro, N.C., that is pushing for improvements in the electoral system, says his organization created and distributed sophisticated computer-based mapping programs to help charity voter drives identify where to concentrate their efforts. Now Democracy South is looking for grant money to start a research and data-collection effort that could combine information from voter databases, the U.S. Census, and other information sources to help charities beyond voter drives.

“You could use this kind of information technology for elections, advocacy, fund raising, whatever requires finding and targeting certain kinds of people,” Mr. Hagens says.

Such technology might help keep grant makers interested in civic-participation projects, too, because it helps groups measure the results of their efforts.

“All the data and all the information systems mean we have the capability to evaluate exactly how mobilization worked, to see how effectively organizations reached out to people,” says Geri Mannion, who runs the Strengthening U.S. Democracy grant-making program at the Carnegie Corporation. “Before we all just went on faith.”