Our Response to COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic has introduced new and unexpected barriers to the voting landscape in the United States. Public health concerns are leading many states to postpone elections and forcing millions of voters to risk their safety to cast a ballot. Our democracy needs to be better prepared. We believe the best and most responsible response to the current crisis is the expansion of flexible voting options – like vote by mail – to keep voters across the country safely engaged in our electoral process. At ideas42, we are supporting the work of like-minded state officials by designing behavioral solutions that helps voters understand, trust, and equitably participate in these new ways of voting. We are also working with nonprofits and technology organizations to help eligible voters directly overcome any barriers and participate in the November election regardless of the voting systems in place in their state.
If you are an election administrator or organization interested in working with us towards this mission, please reach out to ted@ideas42.org and omar@ideas42.org. Also check out our latest resources for supporting civic engagement in the time of COVID-19:
- Safe Voter Playbook – tools and resources on expanding flexible voting options with voter behavior in mind
- Designing for Meaning: Using Behavioral Science to Mobilize the Latino Vote – a guide to specific behavioral barriers to voting faced by Latino voters, plus design ideas for overcoming these barriers (see also a summary of insights from this work)
- Actionable strategies for preventing the minor errors that lead to disqualified mail-in ballots
- Why unfamiliar voting methods make us all new voters now – and how to help people adjust and follow through
- Insights from behavioral science to help journalists combat misinformation with their election coverage
Creating a Culture of Voting with Behavioral Science
Chronically low voter turnout is a significant barrier to a functioning representative democracy. Despite being founded on the idea of government “for the people, by the people,” turnout in U.S. elections is much lower than in other developed countries. Around 60% of eligible voters cast their ballots in presidential elections, while typically only 40% participate in midterm elections. While 2018’s midterm elections were a welcome departure from this trend, permanently maintaining an increase in voter turnout is vitally important.
Low voter turnout shapes policies at the federal, state, and local levels, impacting people’s day-to-day lives–even if it can be hard to visually connect an occasional vote to the policies and laws that affect us all. That’s because there is evidence that lawmakers craft policy that serves the preferences of habitual voters and economic elites, yet habitual voters are not representative of the broader population. They skew older, richer, and more educated than nonvoters and have different policy preferences than the population as a whole. To better ensure that our country’s policies represent the needs and wishes of more people, we have to start with voter turnout.
Many different tools will be needed to boost voter turnout and build a culture of voting in the U.S.—one of them is behavioral science. While behavioral science can’t undo centuries of marginalization and disenfranchisement, it can help shape our proactive efforts to build a voter-inclusive culture. Innovations like automatic voter registration, communications that leverage social norms, and prompting people to make a plan for election day have shown promising results in increasing turnout. We believe these strategies only scratch the surface when it comes to using behavioral science to help more people cast votes.
The Voter Innovation Lab
Our Voter Innovation Lab focuses on delivering the value of behavioral science through operational and policy solutions that impact civic engagement. This work takes many forms, including:
- partnering with dedicated get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations like Democracy Works to develop and test innovative messaging strategies
- collaborating with state and local elections officials to help engage voters
- accelerating policy reform by leveraging our portfolio of applied work to generate new sources of evidence.
- creating new channels to reach traditionally underrepresented communities where they are, like our innovative work with VotER to increase voter registration among patients in hospital waiting rooms
ideas42 has been applying a behavioral lens to voter turnout for a few years. In 2018, we designed direct mail, e-mail, and text message campaigns driven by behavioral insights and reached more than 4 million people who were likely occasional voters and nonvoters to help them make it to the polls. In 2020 we are building on these successes, and expanding our reach across the voting ecosystem.
As part of our broader Civic Engagement portfolio, the Voter Innovation Lab’s primary goal is to expand the American electorate in the long-term, rather than just increase turnout for any specific election. As such, our work is nonpartisan. Over the next several years, we will continue to leverage behavioral science to generate new behaviorally informed strategies to help more people take action at the ballot box and scale solutions proven to make our democracy more representative of all Americans.
Interested in learning how to apply behavioral science to help more people vote? Reach out to us at nvil@ideas42.org or tweet at @ideas42 to join the conversation.
