Voter Engagement for Election Day and Beyond

The Right Question Project Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond
Maria has been a U.S. citizen for almost a decade, but has never seen much value in voting. She’s stayed focused on the next task at hand – getting a job, keeping a job, finding a new one, taking care of her family, paying the rent, getting health care - doing what she could do to help herself through a series of menial labor postings. Now, sitting in a GED classroom in Tucson, AZ, hoping as a 28 year old to get her high school equivalency onto her record, she explained that “voting always seemed like something that other people did. I never really felt that it affected me. Besides, there’s so much I don’t know, I just didn’t think I would understand how to vote.”

Jean, a recently laid off office secretary in her 40s, is currently enrolled in a state funded job training program in central New Hampshire. Preoccupied with trying to find another job, and eager to get her family’s health insurance back, she is hoping that additional job training will prepare her for good paying jobs that do not yet exist. Jean has never voted because she’s “never been quite sure the difference it would make for me.” Then, upon further reflection, she confesses that doesn’t believe she’d “actually know how to vote. It seems kind of complicated.”

Maria, who lives an hour from the Mexican border, and Jean, who’s about an hour from the Canadian one, offer similar explanations for not voting. No matter how many campaign ads appear in their living rooms, no matter how many people knock on their doors and no matter how much information is put into their hands, nothing, it seems, could turn them into voters.

A Shift Takes Place
Then, each of them, thousands of miles apart, participated in a brief educational workshop that dramatically changed their ideas about voting. They learned a new skill for identifying key decisions made by elected officials that affect them and then developed another essential but often overlooked skill, the ability to ask their own questions. “I see now that if I don’t vote,” Jean said, “other people will just keep on making decisions for me.” Maria realized that as well and also noted that “for the first time, I feel like I really want to vote and I need to vote.”

The workshop that led to these changes is part of an unusual approach to engaging voters; The Right Question Project (RQP) Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond . The initiative makes an immediate investment in participants by teaching them specific skills they can use immediately to advocate for themselves, for their children and families in their encounters with public agencies, on the job and in their neighborhoods. As they are developing these skills, people like Jean and Maria are identifying decisions made by elected officials, learning how to generate their own questions about the reasons for decisions, the processes for making them and the role they could play in those decisions. They come out of the workshop with new skills and a sharp appreciation of the value of voting, a deeper sense of urgency about the need to vote and much greater confidence in their own ability to vote.

An evaluation done by a researcher at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University of the initial pilot of the RQP initiative in New Hampshire and Arizona found clear examples of “strong success… particularly in strengthening critical thinking skills.” A pre and post-assessment of one group of adult learners in Arizona also found that learning skills for focusing on decisions and asking their own questions led 93% of them to feel “more prepared” to vote and 87% to confirm they are much more likely to vote than if they had not learned the skills.

Traditional voter education and voter registration efforts have neither budged the voting rate much, nor built skills that last longer than a trip to the voting booth. RQP offers a model for truly effective non-partisan voter engagement that invests in people and offers them skills immediately relevant to their daily challenges. It will not only produce more voters, but more citizens better prepared to help make democracy work on the 364 days a year when no elections are held.

The Voting Problem in our Democracy: Low-income people are affected the most by decisions made in the public sector yet they participate the least as voters in local and national elections relative to other income groups.

Conventional Voter Education Efforts: Conventional voter engagement has often relied on delivering information to people in the hope of persuading, cajoling and convincing them of the importance of voting. But, voting rates in low-income communities have always lagged behind those of other groups. We need to think more creatively about how to engage traditional non-voters.

The Right Question Project Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond is a non-partisan educational initiative that results in people who motivate themselves to vote. But, it also does something else quite important. It gives people a chance to develop key skills for effective participation in many individual decisions that affect them, at their children’s school, the local welfare office, job training program and Medicaid-funded health care service. Those encounters with public agencies are often the endpoint of their interaction with decision-making in the public arena. They could become new starting points for democratic action. Participants in RQP initiative become better self-advocates as well as more effective citizens able to expect and require accountable decision-making from all public officials. They acquire two especially valuable skills – the ability to focus effectively on decisions and to formulate questions about decisions. These are essential skills for greater personal as well as democratic and political efficacy.

Outcomes: In the first pilot run of RQP voter engagement workshops in 2004 in New Hampshire and Arizona, participants reported significant changes in what they know, how they feel and what they will do such as:

• Becoming more independent thinkers
• Seeing connections between their lives and the political process
• Identifying what they want to know
• Feeling more motivated to vote
• Gaining confidence in their ability to vote
• Paying more attention to the electoral process
• Initiating conversations with family members and neighbors about the election
• Affirming that they are far more likely to vote than ever before

See what RQP participants say about what they learned.

How will the Right Question Project Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond reach people in low-income communities? RQP is working with statewide and regional adult literacy programs in ten states: Arizona, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

Professor Donald Green and Dr. Shang Ha of Yale's Institution for Social and Political Studies will be conducting research on the RQP Strategy in five of the states where the initiative will be implemented.

Leadership: The Right Question Project is a unique organization dedicated to developing new ways to promote greater and more effective participation in decision-making and democracy. RQP began in Lawrence, MA over a decade ago, after its founders listened to parents who said they were not participating in their children’s education because they didn’t even know what questions to ask. Now based in Cambridge, RQP develops simple but powerful methods that help all people, no matter their literacy or educational level, learn how to advocate for themselves, navigate complex systems and participate in decision-making processes that affect them. RQP makes its educational methods easily available in a cost-effective way to organizations, programs and agencies working in low and moderate-income communities all over the country.

RQP’s methods have been used by people in very different communities to address many issues, including: soon-to-be-unemployed sugar cane plantation workers in Hawaii advocating for better job training opportunities, welfare clients in New Hampshire advocating for better services, public housing tenants gaining a voice in how to improve their housing development, low-income parents across Massachusetts and in other states taking action to support, monitor and advocate for their children’s education. RQP has received funding from generous individual donors and major foundations for work in various areas - the Packard Foundation (health care), the Wallace Fund (parent involvement in education), the Boston Foundation (active citizenship), Jane’s Trust (adult literacy), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for efforts to document and introduce to a wider public a new idea about Microdemocracy and its implications for improving democratic practices. RQP's work in voter engagement receives major support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, the Whitman Institute and many individual donors.

Key RQP Personnel for The Right Question Project Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond:

Co-Director Luz Santana is a former welfare recipient who earned a Master’s Degree, served as an MIT Community Fellow and is now internationally recognized for her design and facilitation of participatory educational experiences. Co-Director Dan Rothstein is an experienced community organizer and adult educator, a former Fulbright Scholar and National Academy of Education post-doctoral fellow. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Natasha Freidus, the director of Creative Narrationswill expand her work helping selected participants create their own digital stories about discovering the relevance of voting to their lives. She has served as community media coordinator at MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice where she completed her Masters in City Planning.

The RQP National Advisory Board includes such prominent supporters as: Robert Coles, Writer and Editor of DoubleTake Magazine; Craig Kennedy, President of the German Marshall Fund; Bill Kovach, Chair, Committee of Concerned Journalists; Wendy Puriefoy, President of The Public Education Network; and Professors Archon Fung, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Martha Minow, Harvard Law School; and Kay L. Schlozman, Boston College.

For more information, contact:

Dan Rothstein or Luz Santana
The Right Question Project
2464 Massachusetts Ave., Ste. 314
Cambridge, MA 02140
info@rightquestion.org
617.492.1900

Taking the Next Step towards Voting: Overcoming Overlooked Obstacles
A Look Inside a Right Question Project Voter Engagement Workshop

The workshops done in New Hampshire and Arizona in 2004 generated new insights about what keeps many people in low-income communities from voting. Near the end of the workshop, after participants made new connections to the value of voting, and after they acquired skills to focus on decisions and ask their own questions, they got a chance to ask questions about the act of voting. They were presented with this scenario: Imagine it’s the day before the election in November. What questions do you have about actually voting?

Hesitantly at first, but then quickly in succession, they start asking questions that identify some concerns that are widely discussed (and are even being reviewed now by the Supreme Court). But, they also ask questions that reveal an unfamiliarity with voting, a fear of not knowing what to do, and of doing the ‘wrong thing’ in the privacy of the voting booth: (as they wrote them)

Can any-one vote? How many chances do we have? What do you need to vote? Will there be security? Do you have I.D.? what kind of I.D? Were are the locate, and if we have some help for information? Can I bring my children with me? What if I can’t get off work? If I’m working in that time, how am I going to vote? Do I have to register in order to vote? Can we vote here in the classroom? What is the day of the election?

Then, towards the end, these questions came up:What if I don’t know what to do? What if I make a mistake? Will I get punished if I do it wrong?

These questions offer a rare glimpse of concerns that are so rarely articulated in public by non-voters. Many of the participants in the workshops have had negative experiences with forms, requirements and even tests of what they know or are told they should know about how systems and institutions function. They have, for the most part, consistently come up short in their encounters with the welfare office, in the employment bureau, at their children’s schools, in their own school experiences. Voting for them means filling out more forms, making another request in order to register, standing alone opposite a government official who has knowledge they do not possess. It means standing alone inside of a voting booth facing yet another sheet that has to be filled out in a certain way, wary of making a mistake, of forfeiting their vote, of ‘messing up.” It means figuring out where to go, how to get there, what to do with their kids, how to fit it around a work schedule that treats election day no differently than any other work day.

In a widely cited study by the Kettering Foundation about why people did not vote in the 2000 presidential election, the top ten list of reasons checked off includes “too busy,” (the top ranked reason), “not interested,” “didn’t like the candidates” and “forgot.” Nowhere on the Kettering Foundation list is a clear echo of the questions raised by the adult education students in our workshops. Their questions reveal how they see voting as an intimidating, unaccommodating, unfamiliar act that is linked to their other encounters with public institutions. It is not a matter of completing a simple task that they just plumb forgot.

Their very legitimate concerns deserve more respect. Making an investment in their ability to advocate for themselves as part of a voter engagement initiative is a critical first step to expanding the electorate and expanding a citizenry better prepared to participate in decisions and to hold accountable decision-makers on all levels of our democracy.