What we do

Our Work

Secretaries of state, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, and Automatic Voter Registration.

Secretaries of State

Legislatures, Congress, and the courts all shape voting law. But one office has outsized power over whether voting is easy or hard: the secretary of state. In 37 states, the secretary of state is the chief election officer. (Source: Ballotpedia)

What the office controls varies by state, but the core is the same: the statewide voter registration system, certification of results, and the guidance local officials follow when they run early and mail voting. Legislatures write the rules. Secretaries of state decide how they work in practice.

For most of the office's history, voters barely noticed it. From 2000 to 2012, drop-off between the top of the ballot and the lowest-voted statewide office averaged about 4 percent. Millions of people stood in line, voted for president, and skipped the office that runs elections. That began changing after 2020, when candidates who denied the last election's results sought the job of running the next one, and voters took notice: drop-off fell below 1 percent in 2024.

That's progress. It is not the same as voters understanding what the office does, and the gap between the office's power and public knowledge of it is still one of the softest targets in American democracy. Closing that gap is why this program exists.

Find your secretary of state:

Choose your state to open its official election website.

Nonpartisan GOTV Campaigns

Our campaigns give voters the practical information they need at scale: registration deadlines, early voting dates, how to get a mail ballot. We have produced multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that do exactly that, including a $20 million voter education initiative in 2020 that reached voters across the swing states.

Watch our ads

Automatic Voter Registration

What is Automatic Voter Registration?

Automatic Voter Registration makes voting easier and increases turnout by eliminating the burden on individual voters to find out when, where, and how to register for each election.

With Automatic Voter Registration, every eligible voter is automatically registered when they get a driver's license. Eligible citizens who already have licenses are registered too. Anyone who doesn't want to be registered opts out. This is the opposite of "motor-voter" laws, which put the burden on voters to opt in.

Why Automatic Voter Registration?

156M+
voted in 2024
~88M
eligible voters sat out
29%
of 2020 nonvoters: "not registered"
24 + DC
states with AVR

More than 156 million Americans voted in the 2024 election, the second-highest total in American history. That still means roughly one in three eligible voters, nearly 88 million people, did not cast a ballot.

Registration remains the biggest single barrier. In a 2020 survey of nonvoters by Medill, NPR, and Ipsos, 29 percent said the main reason they did not vote was that they were not registered. Applied to that year's nonvoters, that is roughly 22 million people who sat out an election because they were not registered. For context: in the past six presidential elections, the candidates were separated by an average of about 5 million votes nationally.

The people locked out by registration barriers are not a random sample. They are disproportionately young people, people of color, and low-income Americans. Putting the burden on individuals to navigate registration for every election is leaving a lot of our democracy at home, and it is leaving the same communities at home every time.

Momentum keeps growing. 24 states and the District of Columbia have adopted Automatic Voter Registration. When Nevada's system took effect in 2020, it added more than 323,000 new voters in its first two years and drove the state to an all-time high in active registrations. That November, a record 1,407,754 Nevadans voted.

Where AVR stands, state by state

Has enacted or implemented AVR (24 states + D.C., per NCSL). Full detail in the AVR Fact Sheet.