Our Work: Structural voting reforms, with ripple-effect potential.

Lift Every Vote was founded in December 2016 by Joyce Hackett, an author, professor of creative writing, and organizer of public education projects. Its mission: voting projects that change the landscape, and yield lasting registration gains year after year.

2017: Automatic Voter Registration

LEV’s first project: 37 volunteers spend the day hiking up and down the bleachers at the 2017 Democratic Convention, distributing 2,000 educational flyers on Automatic Voter Registration, and educating delegates on how it works.

Joyce then served as statewide organizer for Massachusetts’ Automatic Voter Registration campaign, supported by a coalition of over 60 groups, led by Common Cause. In each of MA’s 138 State House districts, she recruited significant campaign donors, and multiple sets of activists, to visit, teach, and lobby their Representatives. The bill passed 138-0. On behalf of the coalition, Joyce also negotiated the endorsement of Secretary of State William Galvin.

2018: AVR, Felony Rights Restoration, Native Citizen Voter Education Campaign, Fighting CrossCheck

In 2018, Joyce and Jeanne Heifetz joined forces to work on the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s campaign to pass Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to 1.5M citizens with felony convictions. We identified 41,000 Floridians who had signed the petition to get A4 on the ballot, but were rejected on signature issues. We located them, advised them how to avoid another signature rejection, and sent postcards with voting information customized to each of Florida’s 67 counties. Jeanne also organized sending 12,000 cards to every North Dakota Native citizen, announcing the change in its voter ID laws.

LEV members phone banked for pro-voting candidates of both parties. LEV expanded to other states, phone banking for pro-voting Secretary of State candidates from both parties. In Kansas, our members were among the activists who used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain purge lists for Kris Kobach’s deduplication system, CrossCheck, alerting journalists that the Kansas-managed database holding nearly 100 million records of private voter data were protected by security protocols so flawed they could be easily hacked. This lead to the suspension and eventual dismantling of CrossCheck.

2020: 1.3 Million Registration Education Postcards to FL, GA, and PA.

In Florida, we reached over 175,000 formally incarcerated, newly-eligible citizens. In Georgia, we designed, funded and sent close to 880,000 postcards to young voters of color. Another 275,000 went to rural Pennsylvanians, alerting them to a PA policy change that enabled them to vote on demand in their county election office.

2024: Our Largest Generation Project is Organizing High School Registration Education Across the Country.

Some of our Postcards

The postcards we design, fund, and send attract voters voters with arresting images that connect to local issues. Their versos conveying complex state- or even county-specific voting information, in clear, accessible language.