Voter Registration Postcards

Objective:

We ran a randomized controlled trial to determine if the receipt of a handwritten postcard a week after the receipt of an official voter registration form increased the odds of people completing & returning the voter registration form, as compared to the odds of return among people who did not receive a postcard.

Background:

Handwritten postcarding has become an incredibly popular voter outreach tactic among progressive volunteers, with volunteer postcarding groups all over the country. However, there is still very little research on the efficacy of postcarding, especially looking beyond voter turnout effects to effects on registration or candidate choice.

Specifics:

Sister District Action Network (SDAN) partnered with the Voter Participation Center (VPC) to send handwritten postcards encouraging registration to eligible, unregistered individuals living in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona in September 2018 (September Study). These postcards were sent in conjunction with 3 of VPC’s voter registration programs, which sent pre-filled official voter registration forms to all of the people included in this experiment. This study was a replication of our March 2018 voter registration postcarding experiment, except that the present study design included chaser postcards only, and targeted recipients of 2 additional VPC programs.

Read the Results on our Blog!