Milestones: Bringing new voters into the democratic process

Organizing through a pandemic

In the late winter of 2020, Manny Rin was on a plane traveling home from Atlanta. He had just led a training for student leaders of the New Voters Project, preparing them to run voter registration drives for the upcoming election on campuses across the country.

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

As the election drew near, more than 5,000 students in 15 states took part — virtually — in the PIRG New Voters Project, contacting nearly 400,000 other students and urging them to get out and vote. This effort contributed 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 scaled up in a big way. Doug Phelps, Susan Birmingham, Beth DeGrasse and other PIRG staff teamed up with Daniel Malarkey and other student leaders to organize a major conference on the student vote. They enlisted 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 came 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 was also running for president. Given his campaign schedule, the civil rights leader admitted 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 said to a packed Memorial Hall while hundreds of others watched on closed-circuit TV because they couldn’t fit inside the room. With a sly smile he added, “Something must be going on.”

Indeed, something was going on: Over the next eight-plus months, the campaign became 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 teamed 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 renamed NSCVR to become the (much pithier) New Voters Project and the project expanded 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 evolved, Manny Rin, Leigh-Anne Cole and other PIRG organizers incorporated 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 had become America’s oldest and largest youth voter mobilization program, helping more than 2 million young people register and vote in elections spanning four decades.

About this series: PIRG and The Public Interest Network have achieved much more than we can cover on this page. You can find more milestones of our work on democracy below. You can also explore an interactive timeline featuring more of our network’s democracy milestones.