State Voices affiliated groups in Kansas logged 1.75 million voter contacts in 2022
Nearly 88% of voter contacts were by the Voter Participation Center
A recent WatchdogLab article, State Voices claims 140 million voter contacts nationwide in 2022, looked at the breakdown of contacts across all 50 states.
This article will focus on the possible sources of the 1.75 million Kansas voter contacts from progressive State Voices affiliates.
The State Voices Affiliated Network is a progressive organization consisting of 25 “State Tables” and 8 “Emerging States.” As an “emerging” state Kansas does not have a separate “Kansas Voice” organization and budget to share with state partners. Is it possible the new organization Kansas Civic Engagement Table is that conduit for State Voices now? However, Kansas progressive organizations still benefit from some of the State Voices partners around the country.
Several dozen partners in the State Voices Affiliated Network are listed online of the 1200 claimed by the organization. State Voices partners working on Kansas elections are shown in the chart below, along with related Kansas organizations.
Voter Contact Summary
A recent WatchdogLab article explored the 1.5 million mailings to Kansas voters in 2022 from the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information. All of those mailings were counted as voter contacts by State Voices.
Since these VPC/CVI mailings were included in the State Voices total for Kansas, other affiliates contributed the remaining 213,533 voter contacts.
What is known about Kansas connections to known State Voices partners or their Tools for All?
The review below for 2022 accounts for about 350,000 additional voter contacts, which is more than the 210,000 unexplained State Voices contacts.
KSVotes.org reported voter registrations or advance ballot requests: 56,117
Loud Light says they reached 300,000 voters.
So, Loud Light’s tally is likely not included in the original State Voices estimate and and they may or may not be connected.
Kansas Voter Contacts Through Partners
Let’s review the organizations in the chart above starting at the top and considering the State Voices partners in clockwise-order.
Voter Participation Center / Center for Voter Information.
The table above shows nearly 88% of the State Voices voter contacts in Kansas were through VPC/CVI mailings. This is perhaps the only partner with a fairly certain estimate for their voter contacts.
BallotReady and Mainstream’s The Voter Network.
BallotReady is one of State Voices Tools for All.
Prior to Kansas elections The Voter Network (formerly Mainstream Education Foundation) provides a KSBallot.org web site for voter ballot information based on a voter’s address.
Most of the time KSBallot.org is a redirection to its parent’s site (thevoternetwork.org).
However, sometimes the redirection has been to ksballot.civicengine.com, which is a BallotReady site. For example, this WayBack Machine link from Nov. 3, 2021 shows such a redirection.
It’s unclear if contacts may have been counted by States Voices through KSBallot.org in 2022.
The Action Network and Kansas Grassroots / Mainstream’s Voter-to-Voter.
Another State Voices Tools for All is the Action Network.
The Action Network was used to signup get-out-the-vote “volunteers” from non-profit organizations for the Aug. 2 and Nov. 8 elections through social media postings.
Emails from Mainstream’s Voter-to-Voter Network indicated “volunteers” would be paid: A “shift” in the Aug. 2 primary paid $50, while the Nov. 8 general election paid $20/hour.
We've joined forces with several nonpartisan, nonprofit orgs in a phone bank effort to reach communities often underrepresented at the polls. We’re calling to remind them to make their voices heard by voting on August 02. If you would like to join us, we are paying $50 a shift! We'll use the first 20 minutes of each shift to make sure everyone is trained on the script and tools.
PS - We couldn’t do this without volunteer support, but we can also pay $20/hour for folks interested in participating who could use the cash this fall! If you’d like to be paid for your time making phone calls you can let us know that when you attend.
Who is the Get-out-the-Vote sponsor, Kansas Grassroots? This is Kansas Grassroots Consulting, LLC, which is run by Jake Lowen. In 2014 Lowen attended the New Organizing Institute’s Advanced Data BootCamp. The Kansas Grassroots team in Lawrence joined GPS Impact in May 2015.
At GPS Impact in 2020-2022 Lowen purchased Kansas voter registration data 16 times — the second most frequent purchaser of the voter data. [See Protect Democracy below for the most frequent.]
The number of voter contacts through the Kansas Grassroots phone banks is unknown.
The number of voter contacts through Voter-to-Voter is unknown, but could be significant with 440 teams with over 2000 “ambassadors” looking for low-propensity voters.
re:power (formerly Wellstone Action Fund) and Kansas Values Institute, Kansans for Fair Courts, Kansas Appleseed, Kansas Health Foundation, Kansas Trial Lawyers Association, Planned Parenthood Great Plains.
After the New Organizing Institute “imploded” in 2015 the torch was passed to Wellstone Action, which was renamed re:power in 2018. They specialize in managing elections, building movements, and movement technology.
In annual reports re:Power listed these Kansas organizations as their partners:
Kansans for Fair Courts,
Kansas Appleseed,
Kansas Health Foundation,
Kansas Stronger Together,
Kansas Trial Lawyers Association,
Kansas Values Institute,
Planned Parenthood Great Plains.
The number of voter contacts through the these groups is unknown, but several of these groups linked to KSVotes.org to register voters, which is described next.
League of Women Voters and Blueprint Kansas, Inc. dba KSVotes.org.
The IRS 990 filed by Blueprint Kansas, Inc. in 2018 showed they were doing business as KSVotes.org.
The WayBack machine from Jan 5, 2018 shows the original partners at website blueprintkansas.org (which now redirects to facebook.com/KSVotes.org) included Loud Light and the League of Women Voters.
The current KSVotes.org site shows it was built in partnership with Loud Light and GPS Impact. That explains the 16 purchases of Kansas voter registration data by Jake Lowen of GPS Impact — who also ran the phonebank under his Kansas Grassroots using the Action Network.
In 2018 Loud Light granted Blueprint Kansas $114,000 for “voter registration” to build KSVotes.org.
In 2020 the League of Women Voters of Johnson County created an online video about how to use KSVotes.org.
The public statistics for KSVotes.org in the 2022 election (see about page, then find the “click here” link to a Google spreadsheet) show at least 56,117 voter contacts were made in 2022, which the League of Women Voters may have reported to State Voices?
Common Cause, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, League of Women Votes and nine Kansas groups supporting Election Protection, 866-Our-Vote.
The number of voter contacts through the these groups is unknown, but several of these groups linked to KSVotes.org.
Loud Light must not be reporting its voter contacts to State Voices, since their 300,000 figure below from their FaceBook post from Nov. 2022 exceeds the unexplained count.
Loud Light contact numbers from 2020 reported by SwingLeft were also quite large.
Alliance for Youth Organizing/Action and Loud Light.
Loud Light is organizing on college campuses across Kansas: Emporia State, Fort Hays State, Haskell, Johnson County Community College, KSU, KU, Pittsburg State, Washburn, Wichita State.
In Fall 2020 college fellows were to commit 5-15 hours per week and earn $15/hour. In Fall 2022 Loud Light had 40 fellows organizing on 10 college campuses.
The number of Loud Light voter contacts attributable to Alliance for Youth Organizing/Action is not known.
Protect Democracy.
DC-based Protect Democracy purchased 68 copies of the Kansas voter registration file since 2020 for its VoteShield project — much more often than all other groups involved in Kansas politics.
This raises more questions than it answers: Is it possible Protect Democracy shared this data with fellow State Voices Tools for All provider Catalist, which is a database of over 240 million voters in the US? Is it possible Protect Democracy shared this data with fellow State Voices partner Analyst Institute to measure the impact of progressive programs?
The number of voter contacts through these 68 purchases of Kansas voter data is unknown.
Sources of funding
Sources of funding to Kansas organizations will be addressed in future articles since the IRS is years behind in publishing IRS 990 XML files.
