In the last two months, six Swing Blue volunteers have traveled to Maricopa County, Arizona, where we have worked with several organizations to test out new data-informed approaches to registering Democratic-leaning voters.
Why Swing Blue Alliance Chose to Work in Maricopa County
With more than 4.5 million residents and 62% of the Arizona’s registered voters, Maricopa County is the latest front in the battle to register more Democratic voters and ensure a second term for Joe Biden. The urgency to register voters has intensified as inactive voters (mostly Democrats) have been purged from the roles and new voters (primarily Republicans) continue to register. Over the last year, Maricopa County has lost 102,000 registered voters, half of whom are Democrats. This year the trends have continued to worsen: Republicans gained some 10,000 voter registrations while the Democrats lost 15,000.
Despite the challenges of long airplane flights and the limited data (reliable lists of unregistered voters, especially young voters, just don’t exist), the Swing Blue Alliance Arizona team believes that Maricopa County’s large population and low rates of registered voters also gives us an amazing opportunity. By registering likely Democratic voters, we can also help win races up and down the ballot and flip the state legislature. And, of course, keep Biden in the White House.
Getting Started
In March, three SBA volunteers teamed up with three volunteers from the Maricopa County Dems to conduct a small trial of knocking doors at homes where there were no registered voters. In many cases, the occupants of these homes were not eligible to vote, but in others, they were renters who were not aware that they needed to re-register at their current address. Interesting fact: This neighborhood included a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose religious beliefs prohibit them from registering to vote.
In April, three volunteers headed back to Phoenix, where they selected two very different precincts with very low levels of voter registration. One of them, Hudson precinct, is close to Arizona State University. In 2020, three-quarters of the people who turned out in this precinct voted for Biden – but three-quarters of the adults in this precinct are not registered! If we could increase the voter registration rate from 24% to 50%, we could easily double the number of votes this under-registered precinct delivers for Biden. The challenge in this precinct is that many young people live in keycard-only apartment complexes where even the parking lots are accessible only to residents.
Our second precinct, Kleinman, is a mostly minority precinct where just 66% of the population is registered to vote. There is a large immigrant population in Kleinman, which makes it harder to identify eligible voters, especially for volunteers who don’t speak Spanish. Nonetheless, this district is ripe for success: in 2020, the precinct went for Biden by 13 points.
Overcoming Data Challenges
Although Swing Blue Alliance had developed its own technology for cleaning unregistered voter list so that we could eliminate people who had registered, died or moved, we found that we were unable to use those lists with standard canvassing software. Thanks to a heroic effort from the Swing Blue Alliance Voter Registration Data Services team, and with the help of Deepak Puri from The Democracy Labs, we created our own canvassing app using the Glide platform. During the last few hours of the trip, our volunteers put the new app to the test. It worked surprisingly well! Our cleaned lists of unregistered voters proved to be 50% more accurate than the uncleaned lists. We used the lists to find young people still living with their parents. We found four parents of unregistered young adults who were either away at college or at work. The canvassers gave the mothers information and a pep talk as to how to get their kids registered.
What’s Ahead
Based on this experience and our experience in writing letters to parents of unregistered teens, we hope to provide Swing Blue volunteers with a mix of voter registration opportunities in Maricopa County. We plan to test the success rate — percent of attempts that led to offspring registration — of door-to-door conversations. At the same time, we will develop both the data and the human infrastructure to support our canvassing-based approaches to voter registration.
