Response to Dr. Putnam and Mr. Sifry
In their recent opinion piece, Dr. Putnam and Mr. Sifry ignore key evidence and make misleading claims about the efficacy of Vote Forward letters.
Re: “Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One” (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, August 1).
The on-the-ground organizing the writers favor is admirable. But in deriding letters to voters, they are far off the mark. The science is clear: Large-scale randomized controlled trials over multiple election cycles have shown that Vote Forward’s partially handwritten letters significantly boost voter turnout.
A peer-reviewed research study of our 2020 program “The Big Send” found that it was among the highest impact voter turnout programs ever measured in a presidential election. Vote Forward rigorously vets volunteers and encourages personal, heartfelt messages that reach beyond their bubbles — an authentic approach that works.
Overall, voters in our campaigns have consistently voted at rates substantially higher than uncontacted voters in our control groups. In some contexts we’ve seen effect sizes of multiple percentage points, more than competitive with previously studied gold-standard “get-out-the-vote” programs. Handwritten letters have demonstrably caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to vote when they otherwise would not have done so.
Letter writing is a scalable, accessible activity doable year round from anywhere. It is an enjoyable entry point to electoral activism for many volunteers who later engage in deeper community organizing. And letters can be stockpiled to send at the optimal time, leaving space for other voter contact activities like canvassing and phone banking.
Letters to voters are the kind of thoughtful, sustainable approach to volunteer engagement in elections that should be encouraged if we hope to build a strong civic fabric.
A shorter version of this response was published as a letter to the editor in the New York Times on August 1, 2022.