SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — According to the United States Elections Project, in the last presidential election in 2016, 138 million Americans showed up to vote. The United States Elections Project says that number only accounted for a little over half of the number of eligible voters in the United States.
When Syracuse residents, Morgan Vogel and Rebecca Chasen, found out about the number of people who didn’t vote in the last election, they were determined to find a way to get involved in the next one.
After researching what they could do, Vogel and Chasen signed up with an organization called The Post Cards To Swing States Project, to write and send postcards to states with low voter turn out and encourage people to vote.
“It just doesn’t make sense to us that the number of people who voted in the last election was so small,” Vogel said. “We feel like that number should be much closer to 100%.”
When Vogel and Chasen found out about a website that lets people volunteer to write and send encouraging post cards, they knew they needed to set a big goal.
Vogel and Chasen have written over 1,000 post cards to Kentucky, but they don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. They set a goal of writing at least 5,000 post cards to Kentucky residents before the upcoming election.
“We knew we had to set a big goal in order to make a big difference,” Chasen said. “At first, we thought we should write 400 cards. But, as we started writing them, we realized how much we enjoyed it and we didn’t want to stop.”
The organization they are working with, Post Cards To Swing States, is run by both The Progressive Turnout Project and the Indivisible Chicago Alliance . The Post Cards To Swing States Project has sent almost 16 million post cards to 14 swing states this year.
