Dear Democracy Funders: Let’s Lay the Groundwork for 2026 TODAY

We’re in it for the long game

By all accounts, today’s election, like so many of our recent elections, will come down to the wire. Grassroots volunteers across the country on a massive scale have been pulling out all the stops to get out votes and make sure the election is free and fair. After the election, there will be another massive push to make sure all the votes are counted. 

One of the most overlooked factors that makes all of this extraordinary expense and labor necessary, and that jeopardizes the health of our democracy, is this: according to the US Census, in election after election, more than 60 million Americans are not registered to vote. With so many missing from the voter rolls, we’re faced with a situation, again and again, in which the real will of the people struggles to break through.

The problem is especially acute for young voters. More than 10 million of the unregistered are between the ages of 18 and 24. Most states have no reasonable system of voter registration to welcome the youngest voters, as they come of age in high school. The result is mass disenfranchisement for millions of youth. 

Based on US Census data, if 18- and 19-year-olds were registered at the same rates as those 45 and above, we’d have an average of 2 million additional young registered voters in Presidential years, and 2.8 million more in midterms. Every single cycle.

And there is every reason to believe that these young voters would turn out. Indeed, in every presidential election going back to 2004, more than 75% of registered youth turned out. Registration itself is a barrier, especially for young people who have not been taught enough about civics, the mechanics of registration in their state, or how voting can impact their lives and their communities. 

When young people are not registered, many candidates, campaigns, especially those for state and local elections, as well as polling firms, do not have resources to find and engage them. A vicious cycle can develop in which young people feel left out (because they are left out) and that feeling itself can perpetuate low voter turnout.

Our national failure to attend to this eminently fixable obstacle has done and continues to do extraordinary damage to our democracy. 

The key ingredient is funding at a reasonable and consistent level.

It’s not as if the funding does not exist to address high-priority objectives about voting. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen headline after headline pointing to the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being spent, just in this cycle, on political advertising and other types of last-minute, short-term, transactional types of mobilization¹. 

What if, as we think about how we want to be feeling in 2026 and 2028, we consider the kinds of results we can achieve with reasonable and consistent, long-term investment that starts today. The top of my list won’t surprise any readers here: it’s high school voter registration, the most under-appreciated, under-funded, equitable method we have to reach millions more eligible voters year after year, and to strengthen our democracy by welcoming them in. 

Many in the voter registration field do not seem to recognize the massive opportunity that currently exists for young people to register before they turn 18, making high schools the time and place to get it done. 

Existing programs and opportunities are vitally important, and many are effective in their spheres, but they are not sufficient, or we would not see such low registration rates among the youngest voters.

• 40% do not attend college

• 40% do not get driver’s licenses

• Almost all online voter registration systems require the use of a driver’s license or state ID, so, while online voter registration is awesome, it does not (yet) overcome the ID issue in most states.

If the above details are new to you, you are not alone. Mainstream media outlets typically ignore youth voter registration as a cause of low youth turnout and the opportunity to fix the problem in high schools. Most K-12 civics education organizations do not incorporate voter registration into programming, and most democracy organizations have paid little attention to high schools. 

It was the urgency of filling this enormous gap that led me to start The Civics Center in 2018, with a mission to make voter registration part of every high school in America. 

Through experimentation and study, and with the limited resources available, we’ve developed two primary interventions: training students and educators to run nonpartisan voter registration drives in their high schools and providing data and commentary to illuminate the problem, raise awareness, and track changes over time. 

Our work has sparked and supported 250 student-led, adult-supported high school voter registration drives in 35 states this calendar year, up 75% from our first presidential cycle in 2020. 

We’ve trained nearly 1800 students and educators, this year alone. Now, our highest priority is to institutionalize these drives and make them an ongoing tradition, like student newspapers, clubs, and sports, and expand to new communities and schools. 

There are two key ingredients for that: people and time. Advertising (especially hundreds of millions of dollars of it) is great for raising awareness, and there is an enormous need for it. But schools are overburdened and underfunded, so it’s going to take much more to undertake the lift of getting educators trained in the minutia of voter registration and motivating students to participate. They do it when someone they trust has shown them what is possible. 

Sure, hiring staff costs money. But once drives are successful in a few schools in an area, and once communities can see the results, others are motivated to join. Schools get better with practice, and costs come down over time. We have seen this happen in New Hampshire, Allegheny County, PA, and Southern California. In all three, which have very different political cultures from one another, a program that started as a few drives at first has quickly doubled, and we expect to continue increasing over time.  

Here is what it looks like when students hold peer-to-peer drives in their schools:

When we give students and educators the tools to run these drives themselves, we’re giving them a hands-on lesson in democracy and activism. We’re giving them a real world reason to talk to one another about the issues they care about and the power they hold. Most importantly, we’re building a foundation for a lifetime of voting and civic engagement. 

Just like countless other high school activities, it’s designed to introduce our young people to some of the things they may face in their adult lives, which they are on the precipice of entering. Try to imagine this happening in all 26,727 high schools in America, twice per year, every year. That would quickly add up to near universal registration, once and for all.

We’re building the infrastructure to fill an enormous gap that has profound impacts on our democracy and that is barely known. The kind of support we need, and the tremendous long-term, scalable and sustainable impact an investment in this work can have has barely been considered. 

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Funding & Impact

Donors quite rightly want to know: What impact does my money have now and for the future? They want to fund something meaningful, and to see and understand the results. The ultimate question is: we all have a lot of options regarding what to do with our time and money, so why this?

For me, the answer is simple, and it’s the reason I started The Civics Center in 2018: high school voter registration is the most equitable, efficient, and educational means we have in America to reach everyone. It’s straightforward, scalable and elegant as a solution to a problem that has remained entrenched for decades. So why has it been such a challenge from the perspective of getting the needed resources? 

For starters, there is no standard that all organizations follow with respect to how they describe the costs or results of their programs. The result is mountains of opaque and unrealistic claims that set up unreasonable expectations on the part of donors and that leads to over-investment in short-term, technology driven or other transactional types of mobilization and underinvestment in people, relationships and long-term organizing strategies.

Inapt measurement standards for impact are also a barrier. We’re often asked if we have a randomized controlled trial to back up our results. Quantitatively minded vetting organizations have trained donors to look at RCTs as the gold standard, and for many programs they are. 

But to fail to invest in making voter registration part of every high school in America because there is no RCT to prove its effectiveness is a serious mistake. Here’s why.

First, high school voter registration drives seek to activate a whole school community or school district, not just specific individuals. RCTs work best when there are large numbers of subjects. So, for example, they work well when large numbers of individuals are placed at random into a treatment or a control group. To randomize school districts and end up with a meaningful result, one would need to be able to run a program and to have control groups for large numbers of schools or districts. That would mean having a large and equally skilled team to run the experiment. But since funding and infrastructure are so sparse in the whole field, such large teams to run a program like that do not currently exist.

It’s a little like asking for a randomized controlled trial of a texting experiment before cell phones were in wide use. With no one already available to pick up the call, the results would in all likelihood evade easy interpretation. 

To build on this theme, one of the goals of an RCT is to weed out factors other than the specific treatment that contribute to a person taking an action, such as the predisposition of a person to take an action in the first place. But one of the main things we need is to find those educators and students who are predisposed to be interested and to cultivate their existing motivation so they can become drive leaders. This issue might be academic if there were funding available to allow us to grow our program organically at the same time as running an RCT, but the reality is we have neither. And we won’t get to have either if funders insist upon an RCT as a precondition to investing. 

The good news is: we’re obsessed with impact, so we can and do measure our results.

We now have three examples in which we measured the registration rates for the 18-year-olds in different communities before and after students held drives. And in all three, there was a greater than 5 percentage point increase in the communities (cities, towns, school districts) with drives versus comparable communities without. In the voting world, that type of impact, especially since it is sustainable, is huge.

Here’s a chart showing what this looks like in New Hampshire, where students we trained held drives this spring in 13 of the most populous 40 towns in the state. Towns with drives in the top 40 showed a 5.4 percentage point greater increase in the registration rate for 18-year-olds than those without and a 4.5 percentage point greater increase than the increase statewide. 

Just as money is important, so is time. This year, there was a major effort to get funders to donate money “early,” meaning April 2024. So I got the question: If I give you money in April, how many new schools can you recruit to hold drives so the graduating seniors can register in May and June? 

Of course, funding is great any time. Don’t get me wrong, we know the value of digital engagement among young people. But anyone who has spent time around high schools can understand that new funding in April cannot realistically translate into what is needed to get a new drive off the ground, when most schools have received no training and have no planning in place and are already overburdened, especially in under-resourced communities. Making a real impact in this work requires real relationships and real staff who can provide training and support. And that takes time. We don’t even need an RCT to prove it. All we need is a calendar. 

Here are some questions donors almost never ask, but I wish they would: 

• What kind of initial funding does it take to find, recruit, and train an educator, and to support that educator and their students in starting an effective and joyful voter registration program in their school? 

• And what does it cost to create the metrics, infrastructure, community, and feedback that will keep these drives going, year after year, with lower levels of ongoing support needed for retention and engagement?

These questions get to the heart of the matter. We’re building the infrastructure to fill an enormous gap that has profound impacts on our democracy and that is barely known. These kinds of questions focus on the kind of support we need, and the tremendous long-term, scalable and sustainable impact an investment in this work can have. 

The best answer I have is the basic principle of the thing. Young people have a right to vote beginning at age 18. There are 4 million of them every year – 16 million between presidential elections. Their votes can make a difference in any close election. Too many states put roadblocks in their way instead of welcoming them. They are our future. Voting is their power, and we need their voices. They deserve a consistent and reliable system to bring them in.

Did I mention that we are part of a 501(c)(3) organization? 

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Please consider donating to The Civics Center in support of our ongoing data and organizing work:

1. 5 billion in broadcast TV ads, alone

$619 million through August on Google and Meta, alone

$700 million to test ads, including $50 million from Bill Gates, alone

$64.3 million by one Koch-funded super PAC just for battle-ground Senate races, and mostly for ads

$579 in spending by presidential campaigns and Super PACs in the first two weeks of October, alone