Voting-rights groups announce national expansion to reach underrepresented communities

The Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information are expanding their work in an effort to get more eligible but unregistered Americans at the voting booth.

(StateScoop)- Two nonprofit, nonpartisan voting-rights organizations are expanding their efforts to register more voters, using data from public and commercial sources to target their work.

Over the next two months, the groups, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, said they will send voter registration applications to more than 4.7 million eligible but unregistered Americans. The groups told StateScoop they plan to conduct additional digital outreach and follow-up mailings leading into the 2026 midterm elections. The efforts will be focused on registering those often underrepresented in the voting process, such as people of color, young people and unmarried women.

To find eligible but unregistered individuals, the organizations said, they will rely on a variety of data sources and internal analyses to get updated addresses and other information.

The expansion, announced by the groups on Thursday, comes the same week President Donald Trump threatened to eliminate mail-in voting, a move that would potentially disenfranchise millions of voters, and repeated his unsubstantiated claim that voting machines are inaccurate. (The right-wing media outlet Newsmax recently agreed to a $67 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims the network made after the 2020 election, including that the company’s voting systems had been hacked or compromised to alter the election’s outcome.)

Tom Lopach, the Voter Participation Center’s chief executive, said the groups’ expanded effort to register voters was deemed necessary in light of the Trump administration’s attacks on voting access. He said the expansion is also driven by work the center did comparing voter turnout data from the 2024 general election to monthly census numbers.

“What we’ve noticed for a number of years is progress on voter registration in underrepresented communities has been somewhat stagnant, and that in 2024, voter turnout from the communities we serve — people of color, young people and unmarried women — have reduced compared to 2022 and to 2020,” Lopach said. “So, knowing that our goal is to create an even playing field and help underrepresented populations participate in our elections, we knew it was time to run our programs nationally.”