CEO Update: Go Blue (Our Michigan PAV recruitment launch)
This message, like all my messages, will contain a lot of numbers. Bear with me. The numbers are the point.
VoteAmerica just launched our permanent absentee voting (PAV) recruitment program in Michigan. I want to tell you why Michigan, what PAV actually does, and why this is the single most important thing we'll do this cycle.
The number one question I get is: What are VoteAmerica's priority states? We don't have any. We have priority congressional districts.
Michigan is one of 10 states (plus DC) where voters can sign up for permanent absentee voting. It has some of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.
And when we ranked every CD by competitiveness, electorate demographics, and where PAV recruitment could produce the largest turnout impact in November 2026, Michigan's districts kept showing up at the top.
If you want to see the math, here's our targeting spreadsheet with every ranked congressional district. Take a look, it's pretty cool. We're sharing it because we think this is how more organizations should be making targeting decisions. Math, not vibes.
If this sounds familiar, it's because we've been doing this since 2020. It's how we knew Georgia was competitive when nobody else was investing there. It's how we identified Arizona and Nevada as our top targets in 2024. We run the numbers every cycle and let them tell us where to go. We've been right every time.
Now, why PAV specifically.
Most voter mobilization tactics produce about a 1 percentage point increase in turnout. If you're lucky. I've been saying this for years and people keep not believing me, so here's a chart.
See that bar on the far right? That's PAV. 13 percentage points of turnout lift. Everything else the field spends billions of dollars on is clustered between half a point and 3 points. PAV isn't a little better than other tactics. It's in a different category.
We know this because we studied it. Our research with Dr. Scott Minkoff at SUNY New Paltz ran a multivariate regression controlling for age, gender, marital status, race, voter history, and county turnout. The result: 13.53 points in Montana, 12.89 points in Arizona. Among mid-propensity voters, the people who sometimes vote but don't always make it to the polls, the boost was 15 to 20 points.
I want to sit with that for a second. Most of this field is fighting over fractions of a percentage point. We found something that moves the needle by 13.
Here's the other thing about PAV that I keep coming back to. When you sign someone up, they don't just get a ballot for one election. They get a ballot for every election after that. Automatically. No one has to remind them. No organization has to have the budget to reach them again. The ballot shows up whether it's a presidential year or a random off-year primary that nobody's paying attention to.
That's the difference between a temporary fix and a structural one. Low voter turnout is a chronic problem, and you can't solve chronic problems with temporary solutions. PAV is permanent infrastructure.
One more set of numbers, because they matter. The turnout boost from PAV is actually larger for voters of color. In Arizona's 2020 election, PAV lifted turnout among Black voters by 33.6 points, Hispanic voters by 32.6 points, and Native American voters by 31.7 points, compared to 24.7 points for white voters. When you remove barriers to voting, the people who benefit most are the people who faced the most barriers.
Michigan is where we started, but it's one of the places where PAV is available: Arizona, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Virginia, and DC. We'll be expanding as we build out this cycle. The goal is to sign up as many voters as possible for permanent absentee status before November 2026.
We see it before other people do because, as I said, it's math, not vibes. And the math on this one is very clear.
