We held our first set of BlueWave 2020 VoteForward letter writing events – at Makakilo, Windward and Honolulu sites.

We wrote powerful, personal letters to unregistered, likely Democrats in North Carolina and Colorado. We also included pre-populated and pre-stamped registration forms for each recipient, so that they only have to fill in a few boxes on the form, sign and put them in a mailbox.

The results are extremely positive:

  1. 40 volunteers helped

  2. We produced 417 high quality letters

  3. We are more than self-funding. Each letter costs about $.73 but with the printing and supplies donated, the cash cost is below $.60. By “passing the hat”, we raised cash of $263 ($.63 per letter) and stamps for 464 letters.

We are in the “test and prove” stage as Vote Forward, the organization we are working with, is still assessing the effectiveness and how to best increase the response rate to the Voter Registration letters.

Per Gil Mendelson, our coordinator, “My personal assessment, before the data is crunched: This is a great program to win elections. We are reaching out to the hard to reach unregistered Democrats. Most campaigns, including canvassing, will miss these golden voters, because they are not in voter databases and are not at home when we knock. The letters are well-crafted to motivate reluctant citizens and make registration easy. Volunteers want to write these letters because we sense the rewards and will recruit our friends.”

Whatever the response rates, we are talking to Citizens who are hard to reach, will not be getting much other political attention and giving them an easy way to take action. We think this is important to build this to a massive national program. Registering our voters wins elections.

We will be holding monthly letter writing sessions.

Watch our website, IndivisibleHawaii.org for future letter writing dates. Please join us!

In addition, we’re working on ways to let people write letters from the comfort of their home or with a small group of friends.

Thanks to all who joined us and big thanks to Younghee Overly and Gil Mendelson for leading the effort.

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