Thread by @JulieOliverTX

From the start, our plan has been to register & turn out more Democratic voters than any Congressional campaign in TX history.

We've been wearing out our shoes.

And in order to scale, our data team just launched a game-changing voter registration tool:

julieoliver.org/vr

Here's how it works:

1. Head to julieoliver.org/vr.

2. Hover over a precinct to see how many unregistered Democrats have recently moved into that precinct.

3. Chip in.

4. Forms go in the mail with pre-paid return envelopes.

5. We track completion & our team follows up.

We know that Texas places intentional barriers in the way of getting people registered to vote.

Our so-called VDR law, which means you have to be deputized in every one of Texas' 254 counties you're registering voters, is straight out of Jim Crow.

thenation.com/article/texass…

But in 2018, a bunch of driven electoral data nerds and voting rights activists in Texas piloted a program that served as a near approximation of online voter registration that took the fight to Texas’ historically, straight-from-Jim-Crow anti-voting laws.

With just 2 months, they got 156,000 people registered in Texas, an astonishing *70%* of which turned out to vote.

In the process, they flipped 3 GOP-held Texas House seats.

Now we're leveraging that technology at julieoliver.org/vr.

Our election systems are understaffed, underfunded, and they rely on technology that is embarrassingly insecure and out-of-date.

We need Automatic Voter Registration, to outlaw racist anti-voting laws & gerrymandering, and to get our democracy back.

julieoliver.org/issues/voting-…

In order for a democracy to succeed, it needs to be accessible, transparent, fair, honest, and responsive.

The mechanism by which that happens is our Constitutional right to vote.

Unless we can ensure that our government is accountable to the people it exists to serve, then those at the top will continue to rig the system to benefit themselves, with the explicit purpose of further consolidating their wealth and power.

Automatic Voter Registration is common sense and nonpolitical.

Whenever you get a driver’s license, enroll in classes at a public university, or apply for benefits like Social Security, you're automatically registered to vote, unless you opt out.

brennancenter.org/our-work/resea…

Those that fought, bled, even died in the fight for voting rights, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, on buses, at lunch counters, they knew what was at stake.

We owe them. Let's fight like hell to protect our democracy from attacks from within and without.

Until we have Automatic and Same-day Voter Registration, or a modern, secure, nationwide voter registration database, it's up to us.

Help us ensure that we're able to reach those who are traditionally underserved.

Let's bring everyone in.

julieoliver.org/vr