There are about 1.3 million Arizona residents who are eligible to vote, but are not yet registered. During the pandemic, traditional door-to-door voter registration drives have been suspended. In the meantime, organizations like the Arizona Center for Empowerment, the One Arizona Coalition, and Rural Arizona Engagement are getting creative with their registration campaigns and holding drive-through events.
The three community groups are leading a grassroots campaign to register voters — but not through traditional door-to-door canvassing. Instead, they are holding drive-through voter registration events across the state.
Michael O’Connell represents the Arizona Center for Empowerment. He says the goal is to register 250,000 new voters ahead of the Oct. 5 deadline.
"We’ve had a lot of folks register to vote that have recently moved, that need to update their information, maybe change their party preference or change their name or address," O'Connell said. "We’ve had a lot of first time voters come through — it was actually somebody’s 18th birthday today, and they came straight over to register to vote."
O’Connell says the other big change he’s seeing is significant interest in vote-by-mail.
"A lot of people are really excited to have their voice heard this election cycle, but specifically, folks are getting really excited about getting that ballot in the mail, to mitigate some of the fears about the coronavirus and concerns about being in larger groups," he said.
These drives will continue regularly until the Oct. 5 deadline. Information is posted to the Arizona Center for Empowerment's Facebook page.
