Nonprofit Groups Should Help Get Out the Vote

People are drawn to work with nonprofit organizations because they believe that one person can make a real difference in this world, even if slowly and incrementally. Yet, when it comes down to voting, where individual effort can have tremendous, immediate, and significant consequence, nonprofit organizations are strangely absent. The same charities that assist people in managing their daily lives rarely help them to see the importance or power of participation in a democracy.

Whether or not people agree with the incumbent’s ideology and decisions, few Americans would argue that it doesn’t matter who serves as president of the United States — or as governor or school-board member. And few would argue that each individual voter doesn’t make a difference when, like the outcome or not, it was only 537 out of more than 205 million eligible voters who decided the electoral winner in the 2000 presidential race.

Nonprofit organizations are long overdue in helping the people they serve and their own personnel to see that vibrant and informed electoral participation is crucial to the mission of each and every group.

Nonpartisan voter mobilization is not just a legal activity, but one that the federal government encourages. For instance, every organization that operates state-supported service programs for people with disabilities is authorized by federal law to operate a voter-registration center. Federal law also allows states to similarly designate most other kinds of nonprofit organizations as registration sites.

In this presidential-election year, it is critical that charities get involved in such registration efforts, and in voter education and get-out-the-vote drives to help American society, the organizations themselves, and beneficiaries of their programs. If nonprofit groups decline to exercise these democratic rights, they will fail all three.

In the last presidential election, far too few people — especially those traditionally served by nonprofit organizations — cast ballots. Slightly more than half of the voting-age population showed up at the polls, leaving more than 100 million adults unengaged in this critical act of democracy. Electoral participation grows in direct proportion to income, age, and education, as demonstrated in the 2000 presidential election.

Those earning more than $50,000 a year were almost twice as likely to cast a ballot as those earning less than $25,000; the older people get (until 75, when it declines slightly), the higher the odds they vote (those older than 45 are twice as likely to go to the polls as someone age 18 through 25); the more education, the more likely someone is to cast a ballot (college graduates are twice as likely as high-school dropouts). Unemployment and race also matter: Fifty-five percent of the employed show up compared with 35 percent of the jobless; white and black people are about twice as likely to vote as Hispanics and Asians and Pacific Islanders. Only about 40 percent of people with disabilities voted.

We cannot have a healthy society when so many are disengaged from the most fundamental exercise of civic life. This is particularly true when the choosing of elected leaders is allowed to default to people who have more economic security and privileges than the average American. Our Constitution and subsequent laws — especially the Voting Rights Act — were written to protect this nation from the disenfranchisement of its people. Yet, we are doing it to ourselves.

Citizens are not the government’s customers, as some politicians assert. We are its owners. It is our right and our responsibility to select the chief executive and our other elected policy makers. That obligation falls powerfully on all who can vote.

Still, the nonprofit world, ostensibly the part of society most concerned with civic engagement and serving the neediest — too often does little or nothing to encourage Americans to vote. In fact, few groups create incentives even to make sure that their own employees and volunteers vote.

This is not an abstract concern. Nonprofit organizations themselves have a direct stake in the health and vitality of democratic participation. Obviously, it is through elections that people select the political leaders who they think will best represent their individual and collective interests.

Thus, while diligently remaining nonpartisan, charitable groups should do all they can to help their members and program beneficiaries to register, to understand the relevant issues, to hear what candidates have to say about them, and then to get to the polls and vote. Without mobilizing the people nonprofit organizations serve, the underrepresented will stay that way on Election Day — and well beyond.

It may be obvious to nonprofit employees and volunteers that they need to care about government policies and funds that relate to the mission of their organizations. Less immediate (but likely even more consequential), these issues logically build to much broader questions about national priorities, revenue, and tax policy, and even about the very role and function of government — questions about what we expect and can demand of our public institutions and the people we elect to govern us.

High levels of voter participation are necessary to keep politicians responsive and accountable to ordinary people and their organizations. Little except the mobilization of informed and active voters can offset the corrosive influence that campaign contributors’ money has in the political process.

Helping people to become more- engaged and better-educated voters also strengthens the programs of nonprofit organizations. Many nonprofit groups want to assist their clients in taking greater responsibility for themselves and in becoming more self-sufficient and autonomous. Other groups want to enlarge their impact by extending their members’ sense of civic engagement to focus on particular concerns and grander visions of public values. Staff members and volunteers working to build people’s capacity in service to such objectives need encouragement to see electoral participation as a critical part of their efforts.

To the degree that nonprofit organizations, while remaining nonpartisan, assist people in becoming more animated, informed, and effective voters, they contribute not only to their general mission, but also to each individual’s sense of self-worth and personal efficacy.

Both knowing that you have a vote and finding that candidates will seek your support heightens a sense of power. That increased strength filters into other areas of people’s lives and communities. Becoming — and being treated as — an active participant in personal and public life is certainly far better than being a passive recipient of services. What’s more, nonprofit leaders will find themselves more listened to by policy makers if they speak about serving voters instead of clients.

When nonprofit organizations consider all of these factors, the value of efforts to increase democratic participation becomes undeniable. Some national and local leaders have already recognized this fact and are taking action.

Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations, has a Web page designed to serve as a portal to information on voter-registration, education, and get-out-the-vote efforts for all groups that wish to use it. Similarly, the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, a network of statewide and regional coalitions of all kinds of charities, is promoting electoral- participation projects among its members; through its State Policy Action Resource Center it is creating a tool kit and links to information to assist groups with voter mobilization.

Those efforts are quite timely since interest in voter-moblization programs seems to on the rise. NPAction, a Web site created by OMB Watch as a one-stop site for nonprofit involvement in influencing public policy, reports that “voter participation” has been the most frequently searched term for the last two months.

It is not just umbrella groups that are picking up the opportunity presented by the upcoming presidential election. The American Heart Association is starting with its own people, helping 4,000 staff members and the 40,000 in its grass-roots network to register and to educate themselves, and candidates, on issues central to their mission.

In some cities, such as Seattle, myriad efforts are taking hold. Real Change, which produces a newspaper that homeless people sell, has been helping its clients register and has even prepared some of them to seek out and register other homeless and poor people while out on the streets. The Plymouth Housing Group which provides housing to more than 700 low-income tenants, became a registrar of voters and has helped its tenants and others seeking apartments to register, organize candidates’ forums, conduct other voter-education efforts, and get out the vote on Election Day. The Fremont Public Association is a multi-service organization that intends to help the people it sees to register and educate themselves for the election. It also houses the Statewide Poverty Action Network, which is conducting door-to-door voter-mobilization efforts in low-income neighborhoods across Washington State.

As testimony to the importance of such efforts and the power of the Internet, Working Assets has created a special program to help finance online voter-registration efforts by nonprofit organizations. About another 100 foundation and individual donors created the Voter Engagement Donor Network to strengthen nonpartisan voter registration, education, and mobilization grant-making.

But these commendable efforts are not nearly enough.

When the health of our democracy, the mission of nonprofit organizations, and the interests of their program beneficiaries become inextricably linked, as they so clearly are in regard to the electoral process, the need for action takes on an imperative for all of us. Charities and the people they serve simply cannot afford to sit this one out.

Mark Rosenman works in Washington as a distinguished public-service professor at Union Institute & University, headquartered in Cincinnati. He coordinates a project, under the auspices of the Union Institute & University and Independent Sector, to explore ways to help human-service leaders pursue social-change efforts.