My name is Dan Johnson. I’m a lobbyist in Chicago. I started this national campaign to convince colleges, local governments and state governments to work harder and get everybody registered to vote because nothing should stand between Americans and their ballots. (If you want to register to vote now, go to Rock the Vote’s page now).
But every election, millions of Americans are denied their right to vote because they didn’t submit registration paperwork to some government agency weeks ahead of time. Lots of people don’t know that they need to be registered to vote at their current address in order to vote – because our government doesn’t tell them. And just when people get interested in the election in late October, the deadline to register to vote has passed. They don’t get to vote.
This is wrong.
I have spent much of my professional career working to improve our democracy and knock down barriers to the ballot. (You can read about the incident that sparked my passion for getting everybody registered to vote here.) That’s why I launched this campaign with a team of college-aged volunteers to change our voter registration laws and stop denying Americans their right to vote because of bureaucratic paperwork or the convenience of government officials.
Our big goal is to make voter registration automatic — like jury duty — so that everybody is registered to vote. That’s how it is in other countries, and that’s how it should be in the United States.
As a professional lobbyist, I know how to make big goals like this happen: one step at a time. I have been successfully improving Illinois’ voter registration laws, one step at a time, for a decade. Now we’re going national. And I need your help.
We have developed a ten-step plan to implement the big goal of getting everybody registered to vote. Each step is big enough to matter and small enough to get implemented. You can see each step of the plan on our site.
Want to help? Email me at dan@progressivepublicaffairs.com or better yet, start going through each of the ten steps and take action.
