Voter Participation Work in Community-led Organizing An Interview with Anthony Thigpenn, President of Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE), Los Angeles Interview by Christina Roessler, PTP Watch the Interview Video A Power on Production by Progressive Technology Project

How does increasing voter participation fit in with SCOPE’s overall mission and goals?

When I think about whether SCOPE could achieve its mission and its long-term goals without doing the Voter Participation piece, it’s very difficult to envision for a couple of reasons.  Like I said, the heart and soul of what we do is base-building, and probably 60 or 70 percent of the time that we’re doing work, it’s organizing, it’s public policy education and public policy campaigns.  Probably 30 percent of the time, sometimes 20 percent of the time, depending on the year, is really directly voter participation work, but it’s a fundamental part, one, because of the defensive nature of it, just having-  if we didn’t be involved in it - then attacks on education, attacks on healthcare,  - all of the public policy gains we’re trying to do in the public policy arena - are preempted by right-wing initiatives that take the power to do the things we want to do in the public policy arena.  So, that’s very practical for us, that if we didn’t involve ourselves in at least a defensive battle, it limits what we could do in the public policy arena. 

The other thing is that, when you think about building power and the multiple dimensions of power, voting and elections in this society are fundamental.  And if we’re serious about building power to a public policy body, an elected official, or to our members, they will […] say, “Well, how are you serious about building power? We understand all of the other things we do, but here is the fundamental way in which power is exercised, and we’re not doing anything systematic around it.”

So at each level, whether it’s our members and leaders, whether elected officials or other public policy folks, doing the voter participation work has to be a fundamental part of our vision for building and empowering communities.

What is the scale of your work?

The size of the area that we’re working in varies slightly anywhere from 300 to 600 precincts, depending on if we’re talking about a city council district or multiple city council districts, or a state assembly district.  You’re talking there about a city council district [that] has about a hundred thousand registered voters, we’re working three or four of those, so 400-600 thousand registered voters in the general area that we work in. 

Describe the demographics of the areas where SCOPE works

These neighborhoods are inner-city neighborhoods, 30 to 40 percent are the recipients of some form of public assistance, low-income, they’re predominantly communities of color, very mixed, probably 40 to 45 percent Latino, maybe 55% African-American, tend to have a lot of young people involved, and have all the kinds of problems that inner-city low-income communities have: health care; poor education; high unemployment - those kinds of things.

What technology do you use and how does it help?

People are paired up and deployed into the precincts and they’ll go out. We’ll use the state of the art precinct list which has a list of the voters, which information on it will tell you when that person was registered; it will tell you that a male or female; it will tell you, in some cases, if that person is a union member or not; it will tell you if this is a newly-registered voter; or if this is a person that always votes, an occasional voter.  So people will really know who they’re talking to individually.  And so all they have to do if the person is interested, then they’ll circle a “V” for “volunteer,” an “L” for “lead” and move on.  And then we come back and we actually use a bar-code reader - we used to have to keypunch  in all the information - now we can come back, and just through using the bar-code reader, it will capture everyone who has been identified as a potential volunteer or potential lead, in a way that’s much more effective, so it allows for our leader, who’s out there talking to voters, to talk to more voters and spend time talking to them and without worrying about writing things down, and at the same time, we capture it in the very systematic way, and then we can come back, and produce a list of all those people in that precinct that want to be volunteers or leads. 

How do you determine the effectiveness of your efforts?

We can be very, very precise in knowing how many of the total people we contacted actually turned out to vote.  And that’s another technology piece that we use now so we actually go back through and purchase the results of the elections, and we cross-match that with our database of people we contacted, so that we can go back to a precinct leader now, and say, “of the thirty people that you, well let’s say, of the fifty people you identified, you talked to thirty people who said they voted on election day, and really 25 of those people voted.  That’s great.”  Or “Of the thirty people who said they voted, really only 10 people voted, so we need to work on having more honest relationships so they tell us really if they voted or not. 

What is the impact of SCOPE’s voter participation work in Los Angeles?

There’s no question that elected officials take notice in much more serious ways when they know that we can contact 30,000 voters in their district around a given issue.  So the level of respect that we get and attention is important, because it helps fuel the public policy work that we do, and in some cases, I think we can now say that, indirectly, as a result of our work, several key allies of ours have now become being elected at the city level and at the state level through their empowerment, and building this base of educated voters, and so that’s immeasurable in terms of building power and having clout both with the decision-makers but also with our peers, our coalition allies, who have come to respect the abilities and the seriousness and the sustained nature of the work that we’re doing. 

What are the differences between traditional voter registration efforts and SCOPE’s approach?

When you think about the difference between a mobilization effort where you are bringing people in for a very short term period of time, often times people not from that community, and again that invading army approach, and building something more long-term, in the first effort, one of the things that was discovered is that there has been very little evaluation of that.  These massive numbers of people come walk precincts, and there is some rhetoric about whether the turnout increased this or that, or that we won, we are going to move this number of people or that number or people, but very little evaluation.  But what happens right after the day after the election, all those people go back to where they came from, all the information is normally tossed or left someplace, and there’s no evaluation of it, so there’s no real way of being scientific about did we really make an impact. 

The advantage of a long-term approach is that we can - several things- one, that we can do the work, and then always evaluate it afterwards.  So we’ll come back, we’ll get the data of who voted, we’ll do a precinct by precinct analysis, we’ll do maps - color-coded maps - to show where we did well and where we didn’t do well, how many voters we contacted, so you can learn, and you can get better at this, just because there is an analysis and evaluation going on in an ongoing way. [This] doesn’t happen in a short-term tactical campaign. 

The second thing is that we actually do a hybrid, so we build neighborhood-based precinct teams, but we also have sometimes paid teams, but even that are people from our community.  So we provide stipends for people who are available, maybe unemployed, and so available during the weekday, so they’ll walk precincts, but these are still the same people that live in those neighborhoods.  The advantages are a couple: one, there is a relationship that they have with the voter that somebody from outside just doesn’t have, they can talk about the supermarket, they can talk about the church next door, to really connect with people and motivate them in very real and meaningful ways.  And the second thing is, as they do it over time, as they do it over several election cycles, they get better.  They know the terrain, they know where the polling location is, they know the house where there’s a dog and you shouldn’t go in, and so their work is much more effective, just from a practical point of view, as well as being much more effective from an organizing point of view of being able to move voters.

What are the lessons learned?

The most important lessons that we’ve learned over this period of time that we’ve gone from starting doing just direct organizing and integrated in the voter participation work, first is the sustained effort—that you have to stick with it over time and build it step at a time. We didn’t jump to 30 or 60 thousand contacts; we started with 2 thousand contacts, and built from there with a sustained effort. 

A key lesson for us, and this came from my past experience before SCOPE, was having the base first.  having spent the time doing the organizing, developing our leaders, having experience in public policy campaigns, and having the staff with those kinds of experiences, was key to not letting the election begin to drive our work.  But seeing that as a component of our work, but not driving our work itself, is I think, another lesson. 

A third is the appropriate use of technology.  Technology is not a substitute for talking to people, it ought to be a tool to help us spend more time talking and educating people. That’s not always the case, so being clear about what’s the useful technology, and that being the measure.  Is this a tool that really helps us reach more people, spend more time talking to people, or does it create barriers to talking to people and developing those personal relationships? 

And finally the other thing that jumps to mind is the power of a collaborative effort.  The power of really building long-term alliances with organizations and unions through this work is a way that immediately it allows us to get to scale but, more importantly, creates a movement-building relationship that we can build on in many other ways, so whether it’s our public policy work, or our organizing, or regional analysis sessions, the relationship’s built.  And there’s something about not just building a relationship in a meeting where we’re sitting around a table talking, but building a relationship out there talking elbow to elbow with voters and trying to get through a locked fence, and making sure we’re not getting bit by the dog, and analyzing all that, the work builds a much more fundamental relationship of trust and understanding that I think really does build our movement.