Unpacking MI-35

I’m Sandhya Anantharaman, Director of Mobilization at VoteAmerica. We just finished a permanent absentee voting (PAV) recruitment program in Michigan’s 35th State House district ahead of a special election on Tuesday, May 5.

Michigan will be one of the most important states in November. You’re already hearing about it. We wanted to start learning there now, not in September.

So we ran a program with a built-in measurement approach from day one. Before-and-after snapshots. Outcomes tracked by channel. The kind of evaluation that lets us say what actually worked, not just what we spent.

Here is what we found. MI-35 has 218,000 registered voters, and about 169,000 are not signed up for PAV. Over three weeks, we reached them through direct mail, SMS, and digital ads. Our SMS click rates were unusually high, likely because a special election means less competition for attention. That’s the case for investing early, before every organization floods inboxes in October.

We drove over 4,600 people to our tools. 407 of them signed up for permanent absentee voting. That means those 407 voters will now automatically receive a ballot in the mail for every future election. No deadlines to remember or forms to fill out. The ballot just shows up!

Permanent absentee voting increases turnout by roughly 13 percentage points among target voters. Most mobilization tactics produce a 1-point increase if you’re lucky. And unlike a single reminder text or a door knock, PAV is structural. It works for every election going forward, not just one cycle.

Michigan is one of 10 states (plus DC) where voters can register to vote permanently by absentee ballot. The permanent mail ballot list is available to every Michigan voter, but you have to proactively sign up for it. Most people don’t. We take the signup process to them, and our goal is to scale what we learned in MI-35 statewide, and then to every PAV-eligible state before November.

We can do that because we’re efficient on the front end. Over six years, our Google ads have consistently registered voters for well under a dollar per completed registration. That frees up budget for the part that actually changes elections: making sure those voters show up. Registration without turnout follow-up is an incomplete job. We don’t do incomplete jobs.

The midterms will be here before we know it. We already know what works in Michigan, and we have time to scale it.

More findings coming soon.

Thank you,

Sandhya.