Milestones: Bringing new voters into the democratic process

Organizing through a pandemic

In the late winter of 2020, Manny Rin, the director of Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, is on a plane traveling home from Atlanta, where he has just led a training for student leaders to prepare them to run voter registration drives for the upcoming election.

Weeks later, Manny’s plans change. The president has declared a state of emergency, much of the country and nearly every college campus is shut down. Interest in the November election is high, but nobody knows how fear of COVID-19, social distancing guidelines and shifting election rules will affect voter turnout, especially among younger voters.

As the election draws near, more than 5,000 students in 15 states take part — virtually — in the PIRG New Voters Project, contacting nearly 400,000 other students and urging them to get out and vote. This effort contributes to an eye-popping increase in young voter participation, with youth turnout up 22% over 2016 in New Jersey, 18% in Arizona, 17% in California and 14% in Georgia.

“Of course, some of 2020’s historic turnout can be attributed to expanded vote by mail options and increased interest in the election,” said Manny. “But this rise is also the culmination of years of our program investing in training young activists on college campuses and running a peer-to-peer voter engagement program at the local level.”

America’s largest nonpartisan young voter project 

Voter registration drives had long been on the menu of public interest projects at Student PIRG chapters.

In 1984, these efforts scale up in a big way. Beth DeGrasse and other PIRG staff team up with Daniel Malarkey and other student leaders to organize a major conference on the student vote. They enlist 880 campus leaders and newspaper editors to call on students across the country to attend a conference on student voter registration. Over the weekend of Feb. 11-13, 1,500 students from 42 states come to Harvard University to hear civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and other speakers, engage in workshops and conversations, and launch the National Student Campaign for Voter Registration.

That year, Jackson is also running for president. Given his campaign schedule, the civil rights leader admits to the students he had hoped for a low turnout at the conference, so he could cancel and concentrate his energies on the Iowa caucuses.

“But here you are,” he says to a packed Memorial Hall while hundreds of others watch on closed-circuit TV because they can’t fit inside the room. With a sly smile he adds, “Something must be going on.”

Indeed, something is going on: Over the next eight-plus months, the campaign becomes the most successful student voter registration effort in the nation’s history, reaching 1,000 campuses and 2,000 communities, involving 10,000 volunteers, and helping 750,000 new young voters register (a 17% increase), while adding another 100,000 new registrations in predominantly low-income and minority communities.

Tactics evolve, the goal remains the same

In 1994, the Student PIRGs team up with Rock the Vote!, United States Student Association, National Council of La Raza and others to form the Youth Vote coalition. In 2004, the Student PIRGs rename NSCVR to become the (much pithier) New Voters Project and the project expands thanks in part to a major grant by the Pew Charitable Trusts, secured under the leadership of PIRG’s Ivan Frishberg. As technology and students’ preferred modes of communication evolve, Manny Rin, Leigh-Anne Cole and other PIRG organizers incorporate social media, text and other types of peer-to-peer organizing, informed by sophisticated research conducted by partners such as the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

By 2020, the project is now America’s oldest and largest youth voter mobilization program, helping more than 2 million young people register and vote in elections spanning four decades.