In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do (2024 Edition)

A few years back on this site, I revealed my political preferences in American elections. While my novel Civil Blood and its sequel try to be political without being heavily partisan, I myself am pretty firmly in one camp.

And over the last month or two, I and many of my friends are looking at the current election cycle and saying:

“OH CRAP, WHAT CAN I DO?”

If you’re asking that question, I’m here to help.

So What Can You Do?

The easiest answer is, of course, “Vote!” or “Vote harder!” or “Vote and bring three friends!” Which is nice, but it doesn’t move the needle much. I’ve been voting. My friends are already voting. Further, I don’t live in a swing state, so the chances that my personal vote is going to make a difference are negligible. This might be the case for you, too. But giving up doesn’t feel right, either.

Politicians, whom you may or may not trust, are all too happy to say “Donate!” Which is nice if you have disposable income, but if I gave money every time I felt afraid about the political future, I’d be buried under a pile of debt as big as Mount McKinley. Also, as a side note, if you’re going to give, don’t trust text messages and e-mails screaming about giant match numbers. Look up the organization before forking over the money: sometimes they’re only tangentially related to the candidate you think they’re advertising. Go to the candidate’s website to do it directly.

To be clear, I’m not against donations. In 2008, being gainfully employed with a certain amount of stability, I gave to my first political campaign, and have ever since. But that doesn’t feel like enough any more, right?

So the third option presents itself…

Volunteering to Get Out the Vote

The best way to get out the vote, by far, is canvassing: you go out in person, knock on doors, and introduce yourself to one voter at a time. Even if you’re not in a swing state, you can influence the course of a congressional election that could change the balance of power in the House and Senate. That’s a big deal. (The not-so-glamorous local elections also matter, but being on the introverted side, I have yet to try this technique.)

In 2016, I tried phone banking, which supposedly is the second best method, but I found it annoying. The best thing I could say about my attempt was that I eliminated disconnected phone numbers to let some other volunteer concentrate on calling actual people. My few contacts with human beings on the other end of the phone changed no minds, netted no voters. It didn’t help that I didn’t have a script to follow, or training of any sort.

But in 2018, I found I could use my talents more effectively. I could write letters or postcards to get out the vote. My handwriting is legible, and I possess a little patience.

If this describes you… you could swing a state.

Introducing Vote Forward

The organization I volunteered for is called Vote Forward, and they’re awesome for worried introverts.

Their key argument is this: a lot of eligible voters toss out direct mail or e-mail without reading it. But if you got a hand-written letter in the mail, it’s such an unusual occurrence that you’d open it up just to see what it is. And once you read a personal message from a volunteer, you might be more likely to vote.

Of course, it’s far from magic. Vote Forward estimated that sent letters or postcards have about a 3% conversion rate. It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a lot higher than e-mail or direct mail. I usually pitch it as “for every 100 of these letters I write, it’s like voting in a swing state and bringing 2-3 friends.”

These numbers can add up. In the 2020 presidential election, about 200,000 Vote Forward volunteers sent 17.6 million letters, and moved approximately 126,000 votes. Now, if you’re sitting there with a calculator, you might be like, “Wait, that’s actually more like a 0.7% conversion rate,” which is fair. But the margins of victory in some swing states that year?

Georgia: 11,779 (Biden)
Arizona: 10,457 (Biden)
Nevada: 33,596 (Biden)
Pennsylvania: 80,555 (Biden)
North Carolina: 74,483 (Trump)

Obviously, I’m not saying it made all the difference… but with margins that narrow? This year, it might.

But Will I Feel Like a Shill? Is It Complicated? Or Expensive?

No to all three.

After downloading a batch of 5 or 20 addresses and blank forms, you fill out the form with a blue pen (supposedly the friendliest, most professional-seeming color) including why you vote and why they should, too. Note that you’re not supposed to mention a specific candidate or slogan, as those can be turn-offs. But you can tell a personal story or just go with something generic like “I want to be a part of making history,” or “since my grandparents came here from another country, I feel a sense of duty here.” Stuff like that.

Then you address an envelope, put the letter inside, add a stamp, and the mail is ready to go. Now, stamps are a little pricey for mass mailing these days — 100 letters at 73 cents per stamp adds up to as much as a decent campaign donation! But if you can’t afford postage, Vote Forward’s website has a place where you can sign up and they’ll send you voter kits that include rolls of stamps.

All that’s left is sending the letters at the optimal time. There’s two kinds of campaigns that differ here — if the address belongs to a potential first-time voter, you send it ASAP so they can register in time. If it’s part of a get-out-the-vote drive, you send it at Vote Forward’s optimal time in October where there’s still enough time to register and/or vote, but not so much time that the voter blows it off and forgets about it until Election Day.

And That’s It?

Yes, unless you wanna be super-enthusiastic and tell all your friends, or get your parents or your kids involved… that kind of thing.

So far this year, I’ve gotten one co-worker into it, two families’ worth of family friends, my daughter, and four of my daughter’s friends. And check out the photo!

That’s our first crop of 200 letters, 40 written and addressed by the kiddo, and 160 by me. Of course, the photo is old — with a little help from the team, we hit 400 by July 30th, and we still have all of August, September, and a bit of October to go!

What if I Don’t Know What to Say?

I kept mine nicely generic. You can use it if you want:

“I vote because generations of Americans before us marched, fought, and died to secure our right to choose our leaders. I’m not giving up on this state or this country, and I hope you’ll join me by voting as soon as possible. Let’s make those past heroes proud!”

This keeps the focus on a lot of good patriotic feelings. The person you’re writing to might not agree with “a woman’s right to choose” (which is definitely on the ballot this year) but I think we can agree we’ve got a right to choose our leaders, and a democracy is only healthy if we exercise our right.

“I’m not giving up” doesn’t shame them for not wanting to vote (that’s legit) but it sets me up as someone who doesn’t quit, and “I hope you’ll join me” is an invitation rather than a castigation.

Then there’s what advertisers call the “call to action” at the end — voting as soon as possible — and the warm fuzzy motivation of making our ancestors proud. Sometimes I switch it up and say “let’s make history,” because this election is totally going to be historic one way or the other, but most of the time, I stick to this script.

So that’s the kind of structure you want — not too long, not too short, nothing insulting or offensive, all brought together at the end with a “get out and vote” message. And by the time you write 100 of these, you tend to believe it. And I feel much less worried, not because I’m confident in a particular candidate, but because I know I’m doing what I can.

I’m not giving up, no matter what the polls say.

And I hope you’ll join me.

ADDENDUM

In case you’re shopping around for other organizations…

Postcards To Voters is like Vote Forward, but the postage is cheaper and the messages shorter. You can make your own postcards or get them from your home state to let the voter know that we’re all in this together.

Postcards For America is different, but also useful — it sends postcards to elected representatives to help sway their votes.

The Center for Common Ground specializes in BIPOC voters. Again, postcards.

The Content Creator Team is the place to go if you’re a designer, videographer, artist, or meme creator. Yes, you read that right, you can meme for the team.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has this page here on being a virtual text banker. It’s like phone banking, but no speaking required!

And if you’re an extrovert who’s read this far, the state party websites for Democrats that provide training for actual door-to-door canvassing are here. Note that the canvassers often need a ride to their destination, so even if you don’t want to talk to people, you can provide the wheels (and maybe some air-conditioning!) to help the team directly.

In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do

Once upon a time, I was not very political. Those times, naturally, are over.

In 2016, I volunteered my time to do some phone banking. It did not go well. They were probably the most ineffectual hours spent by anyone with a phone, ever, and I’m including that time I left a message on an answering machine asking a girl to the junior prom. (Yeah, I had game. Why do you ask?)

The phone banking consisted of calling people of my preferred political party in swing states. And in 2016, people in swing states were absolutely deluged in calls. I heard answering machine messages saying “We’re not at home right now. If this is a political call, hang up and cross us off your list.” Every voter I reached said “I’m already ready to vote, our family has a plan,” with the exception of one person who went Green Party. I changed no minds. The best thing I did was update the registry so that no one else on the team wasted their time calling a dead number.

This year, I’m trying something different. I signed up with Vote Forward to see if I could get some use out of this writing thing I’m supposed to be good at. Their theory is that since no one gets hand-written letters any more, the average voter would be curious to see one in the mail and open it. Inside is a handwritten letter encouraging the reader to have a plan to vote.

I should be clear that there’s some hard data on this from previous elections. The best way to get someone to vote, bar none, is to volunteer to knock on doors, talk to someone, and leave literature: it’s got a conversion rate of about 20%. But if you don’t live in a swing state, that option’s not going to score your team many voters where it matters. Letter-writing like this has about a 3% rate — which is much higher than ads for clicks.

The process is pretty simple. You log in to the database of voters, click “Adopt Voters” from swingable states in batches of 5 or 20. (The “adoption” process is so nobody duplicates your work.) Then, you download and print the names, and write your letters. Vote Forward gives you a return address that matches their in-state field offices, so you aren’t telling complete strangers where you live. Download the form letters, add your personal message (no issues, no specific candidates, just encourage them to vote), and fold it up in the hand-written envelope. Then you add a stamp that you bought (think of it as supporting the Postal Service).

Then you hold on to the letters and send them on the date that’s optimized for voter action and retention.

It takes about two hours for me to bust through 20 letters from download to final product. I did 20 a day, and at the end of my first week… behold!

That’s a hundred envelopes, or, if the ratio is about right, three voters in swing states. It doesn’t sound like much, but before this, my vote would have zero influence on the election. That’s just how my state works in the Electoral College. When people on Facebook say “Vote!” after whatever bad news comes their way, I can say “Not only did I vote, I brought three friends!”

Will it make a difference? I don’t know. But I feel a hell of a lot less helpless. And maybe, if enough of us more-than-triple our impact like this, we can get better leaders. The site says they have more than 100,000 volunteers, and their goal for letters is in the millions.

Vote Forward is at https://www.votefwd.org.

Game on.