Tanya Honderick, 51, is a public health nurse. When COVID-19 hit, she was stuck at home like so many others. As she watched the news and saw how her elected officials were responding to the pandemic, she became increasingly livid.
“I was tired of hearing the nastiness when people go to testify about public health issues,” said Honderick, the former director of the Master of Public Health program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. “They're just trying to provide information. To have an elected official berate somebody during testifying is unacceptable.”
Honderick got so angry she decided to step away from her job, set up shop as an independent public health consultant and devote more time to boosting voter turnout.
“I started thinking more about our government statewide and then also the county commissioners who we elect,” she said. “What is the root here of what we need to do in public health to make it work differently? And I just kept coming back to voting.”
Early voting has started in Kansas, and first reports indicate a record turnout. That’s consistent with the historically high turnout in recent elections. Still, in presidential election years going back to 1900, no more than two-thirds of the country’s eligible voters cast a ballot. The same is true in Kansas.
Now Voter to Voter, an initiative of Kansas-based The Voter Network, is working to get more Kansans to the polls by applying a tactic social and political campaigns have used for decades: appealing to people you know and love with good-natured peer pressure.
Nudging friends
The Voter to Voter process works when one person, known as an “ambassador,” recruits people in their social network to vote. They may be the parents of your child’s friends, your book club or co-workers, maybe your exercise buddies.
Then, those 10 people reach out to 10 people they know, and the cycle continues, creating a human chain of prospective voters.
On a recent afternoon, Erin Woods, 54, and Kelly Brende, 55, were at Woods’ kitchen table in suburban Leawood, buried in their laptops. The two women have known each other for more than 20 years; their kids were infants in the same day care and went all through the Shawnee Mission School District together.
Both women started together on the PTA in their kids’ grade schools, and continued as members and volunteers through high school. They leaned into civic engagement after then-Gov. Sam Brownback signed an historic tax cut that adversely affected funding for schools. Class sizes crept up, schools began sharing part-time nurses, schools closed.
Woods had been involved with the non-partisan Mainstream Coalition, a Johnson County organization that emerged in the early 1990s in response to rising extremism. She heard about Voter to Voter at one of the meetings and called Brende to learn more about it. Woods said the idea of Voter to Voter made sense.
“It sounded easy to do. You weren't reaching out to strangers,” she said. “It helped you identify the friends who needed a little more encouragement to vote so you could kind of spend your time effectively.”
Today the women have a tight-knit group of ambassadors that’s turning into its own social network. They have a group chat and often talk at night, when they’re at the computers doing their get-out-the-vote work. They brainstorm how to reach more people. Sometimes they talk about their families, what they’ve read or who knows a good plumber. But it always comes back to turnout.
“Here it says that 52% of my voters are low propensity voters,” Brende said, pointing out a colorful graphic on her screen. “That means they vote, but not in every election.”
As the election grows closer, ambassadors cater messages to what each of their contacts needs. Voter to Voter provides scripts, or they can write their own.
“Before the primary, I might send a text or email, ‘Hey, just a reminder there’s an election coming up!’” Woods said. “Later, I might send a message, ‘Here’s your sample ballot and your polling place,’ or ‘wanted you to know today’s the start of absentee voting.’”
They follow their people until Election Day.
“The day before the election we will know that some of our people have voted,” Brende said, “so we will only reach out to those who have not voted. For some people, their list of 10 may dwindle to two.”
Brende has ten times the number of contacts she had when she started. For Woods, this will be her fourth election cycle with Voter to Voter. She’s now a team leader supervising 80 ambassadors, and she has some 300 contacts of her own. Between them, the two women could touch 1,200 prospective voters.
A long history
Civil rights activists, unions and political campaigns have been using the personal touch to motivate voters for decades. Modern campaigns like Barack Obama’s in 2008 added sophisticated digital tools.
But after the 2016 election, mostly progressive techies developed a new generation of software and apps.
Donald Green, professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a preeminent scholar who wrote a widely used book on increasing voter turnout, has no doubt friend-to-friend organizing works.
“They recognize you as being one of them, especially because you don’t have a hard-edged agenda, you’re not telling them who to vote for,” he said. “It’s not like they’re going to say, ‘Uncle Don, don’t ever call me again!’ It’s going to be taken in a positive way.”
One of Green’s many collaborative studies at Columbia and elsewhere found turnout increased more than 13% among voters who received election reminders from someone they knew. Academics call it “relational organizing.”
By comparison, an MIT study revealed campaigns using robo texts and impersonal mass emailing increased turnout by less than half a percent.
But Green acknowledges friend-to-friend strategy has limitations.
Our social networks tend to involve people who think like we do — they likely already plan to vote.
Also, researchers on relational organizing have sometimes offered to pay people to reach out to their friends in an effort to get a larger sample size for their studies. Green says efforts like this haven’t been effective; paid participants don’t have the same passion or commitment to the messaging.
Another problem is that people have increasingly turned away from politics and the polarized rhetoric of campaigns and news. Trust in institutions like the press and government has gone down. One third of the respondents to a 2019 Pew Research Study cited either government overreach, government negligence or government inaction.
Nearly the same percentage, 38%, said they have no trust in mass media’s ability to report fair and balanced news in response to a 2022 Gallup Poll.
But Green argues there is still heightened interest in the election, which can counter voter apathy and disengagement, and make social network organizing more effective.
“It should be easier,” he said. “In the old days, canvassers used to complain that nobody thought there was any reason to vote, the parties were just the same. Whatever you say about Trump and Harris, they’re not the same.”
In Kansas, Voter to Voter says it’s upped turnout by 20%. Green said he’s skeptical of that because accurately measuring the impact of any relational organizing effort requires a sophisticated, randomized study. Still, he said, he’s all for what’s happening in Kansas.
As the Executive Director of Kansas’ The Voter Network, Lindsay Ford oversees Voter to Voter. She got involved in 2018 because she had first-hand experience with the impact of bad policy. She said she grew up in a family of small business owners in Olathe; her parents couldn’t afford health insurance.
“I remember getting sick in high school and that was hard,” she said. “I felt guilty about being sick because I knew it was costing them a lot of money. So for me, I saw how health care dramatically impacted our own little nuclear family and it made me feel so powerless.”
Like Tanya Honderick, the public health nurse and administrator, Ford wanted to empower people by helping them understand the link between their elected officials — local, state and national — and their everyday lives.
“A lot of people just don’t realize the power they have to change those systems or choose who represents them. And it can be legitimately tricky to vote,” she said. “We’re not trying to change hearts and minds. We’re trying to influence behavior.”
