Vote Forward Overview for Letter Recipients
Vote Forward is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering grassroots volunteers, wherever they may be, to encourage fellow citizens to vote.
Vote Forward volunteers encourage fellow citizens to participate in our democracy by writing and sending letters at their own expense. A diverse community of hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all over the country has written millions of letters to voters since 2018.
Every volunteer is vetted before they are permitted to participate, and volunteers who wish to write large numbers of letters are required to share their personal messages with Vote Forward to ensure they are following our guidelines. Vote Forward volunteers also agree to our terms of use, specifically promising “to be respectful at all times in communications with fellow citizens.” In the extremely rare cases when volunteers stray from this agreement or Vote Forward’s guidelines, we have a process to disable their accounts.
Voter rolls are public information, with voter names and addresses made available upon request. Vote Forward obtains voter rolls from election officials in key states, and connects volunteers with voters using an online platform. For most campaigns, volunteers write their names and “Vote Forward” on each envelope. For some campaigns, we ask volunteers to use our in-state mailboxes as the return address to centralize the collection of returned mail. Volunteers are not required to take either approach, and many send letters using their own return addresses.
Vote Forward letter templates are nonpartisan, simply encouraging the recipient to vote and providing important election information. Each letter template includes a unique code that letter recipients can use to opt out of future mailings at https://votefwd.org/opt-out.
As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Vote Forward is permitted to do some political work, but all of our letter templates use nonpartisan language and volunteers, regardless of their political leanings, are instructed not to reference candidates or political parties in the personal messages they write. Although Vote Forward cannot monitor every message each volunteer writes, our instructions and guidelines firmly disallow partisan language.
Vote Forward works to ensure that voter addresses are as accurate as possible. We receive regular voter roll updates, which include updated mailing addresses when voters update their voter registrations. Even with these updates, we know that voter rolls are imperfect, and letters may sometimes arrive at an out-of-date or incorrect address.
We believe our democracy depends on everyone participating. And even if recipients are not pleased to receive a letter from a volunteer encouraging them to vote, we do hope they exercise their right to vote in all upcoming elections.
Note: Vote Forward is not affiliated in any way with the "Forward Party."