Voter Education in the 2010 Election
In the 2010 election, the Voter Education Program was able to reach over 100,000 voters through phone, mail and email in just one month. Though the results of the election were mixed for the environment, we did make some good progress and laid the foundation for important work to come. Statewide voter turnout was record-breaking for a non-presidential year. And the VEP broke some of our own records for voter contact, while continuing to test new ways of communicating with voters.
The 2010 election season also marked the beginning of an exciting partnership for the Voter Education Program with El Centro de la Raza. We developed a project to use non-partisan voter engagement tools in a bilingual get out the vote program. Together, we contacted 10,000 voters by mail and phone through the “Vota Ambiente Verde” campaign in addition to 7 Spanish-language ads broadcasted through radio stations across the state and banner ads on Spanish-language websites.
“This get out the vote effort is a continuing step in the process of building a strong partnership between the environmental and social justice communities,” said Estela Ortega, Executive Director of El Centro de la Raza. “Our shared values make this a logical alliance in building what Dr. Martin Luther King referred to as, “the beloved community.”
The bilingual outreach was built on the best practices the Voter Education Program has developed over the last two years, thorough our partnership with the Analyst Institute. Together we worked to rigorously test and assess the outreach we’ve done and incorporate the lessons learned into our current outreach tactics. We look forward to putting these lessons learned into practice in the next election.
And as we continue our partnership with El Centro de la Raza, we are looking forward to building on the tradition of environmental values shared between our two organizations, and to continually increase voter engagement.
Click here to see an example of the mailers that went out across the state.
