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Turnout2020

Research Absentee Ballot Forms

By helping voters apply for absentee ballots online, we can increase turnout in upcoming elections, without requiring voters to go to the polling place.

Posted March 25, 2020

Turnout2020 is building a 50-state absentee ballot request tool, so that voters can register to vote by mail easily online. We have collected official PDF forms for most states, and are working on making these fillable via our website.

For states without official absentee request forms, some allow voters to write their own letters. We would like to understand the legal requirements here, so we can create template documents and allow voters to fill these in as well.

We are also interested in which states allow online signatures of voter registration and absentee ballot request forms. Some states have hard "wet" signature requirements (eg, Texas) for voting, but not for commercial contracts. We believe this is an area where an aggressive legal strategy could help significantly improve voter access to the ballot, by making signing your registration as easy as DocuSign.

Project Plan

Preparation Phase

  • Intro call with coordinator

Collaboration Phase

  • Research state voter registration and absentee ballot request statutes

Wrap Up

  • Deliver legal research or brief

This project is complete!

This project has been completed thanks to the efforts of our volunteers.

Visit the Project Directory to check out other projects that still need your help!

Additional Information

  • Time Commitment: 1-5 hours
  • Training Provided: Yes
  • Additional Training Details: We can provide an introductory call, but we do not have a formal training process defined yet.
  • Site-Preference: Remote
  • Open to Law Students: No
  • Additional Location Details: We are an all-remote team, and use Zoom daily. We would be happy to invite you to our Slack for frequent communication.
  • Bar License(s) required: Any Bar License
  • Required Languages: None
  • Required Legal Expertise: Voting Rights
  • Deliverables Due: May 1, 2020
  • Mentoring Provided: No
  • Supervision Provided: Yes
Turnout2020

Turnout2020 is a nonprofit organization founded by a small team of elections and technology experts (including the founders of Vote.org and Vote.gov), who have come together to combat the chaos of the 2020 election cycle by helping to drive record-shattering voter turnout. We will accomplish this via hyper-aggressive and targeted outreach to the millions of low and no-propensity voters who are generally neglected by partisan groups. This isn’t just empty rhetoric: collectively we’ve registered about 20 million voters and run GOTV to tens of millions more in our past roles. Now we’re scaling up.

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