Activists review voter participation strategies

Yawu Miller

From Bangor, Maine to San Diego, California there are more than 250,000 nonprofit organizations registered in the United States.

To Malia Lazu, national field director for the Center for Voting and Democracy, those nonprofits represent a network of community leadership that can be harnessed to energize the country’s democratic process by bringing new voters into the political process.

It’s a strategy Lazu helped pioneer in Boston and Brockton as executive director of MassVOTE.

“Educating the people who run nonprofits and giving them the tools to reach out to voters is how MassVOTE has done so well,” Lazu said, speaking during a breakfast fundraiser for the organization.

While MassVOTE (Voter Outreach, Training and Education) has done well working with a healthy cross-section of nonprofits, the efforts of MassVOTE and other organizations like it are being stymied by an atmosphere of intimidation that has left many nonprofit directors cool to electoral politics, according to Tufts University professor Jeffrey M. Berry.

As Berry pointed out, it’s legal for nonprofits to participate in electoral politics so long as they do not endorse or make contributions to candidates. The Internal Revenue Service says companies can even lobby politicians and retain their nonprofit status, so long as they do not lobby politicians to a substantial degree.

But in a study Berry recently conducted, only 54 percent of CEOs of American nonprofits understood that their organizations could participate in electoral politics.

“CEOs of America’s nonprofits are not an impressive bunch when it comes to understanding the laws regulating them,” Berry said. “People go into nonprofits not because they’re interested in politics, but because they’re passionate about whatever their nonprofit does.”

The ignorance of many nonprofit heads makes the sector a vastly untapped reservoir of organizing potential. In Boston, only a handful of the dozens of community-based organizations, social justice groups, community development corporations and other nonprofit entities have participated in voter mobilization drives.

The few that have participated arguably have helped boost declining turnout rates, changed the complexion of the city’s electorate and altered the political dynamic of the city. Voting drives in black and Latino communities in Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain have helped put those communities on the political map.

These gains are necessary to keep democracy alive in the United States, according to Lazu.

“Representative government can’t depend on the benevolence of its leaders,” she said. “I have to depend on the power of its voters.”

MassVOTE’s strategy in working with nonprofits was to provide nonprofits with technological tools like voter lists and databases to help them reach voters as well as educational materials to help motivate people to vote.

“We know people don’t vote because they’re not invited into the process,” she said. “But when you get voters into the pipeline, they will demand a more representative government.”

MassVOTE has also fought at the municipal and state level for voter rights, securing victories ranging from sandwich-board signs notifying residents of upcoming elections to a court decision striking down a House redistricting map widely perceived as undermining minority voting power.

With better-educated nonprofit heads and better-educated voters, democracy in the United States can strengthen its democracy and improve the quality of elected representatives, according to Lazu.

“Civic leaders are accessible,” she said. “We know who they are. They run nonprofits.”