Texas Civil Rights Project - Election Protection 2022 https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/proposals-2021/texas-civil-rights-project-election-protection-2022 https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/@@site-logo/sitelogo-75x75.png

Texas Civil Rights Project - Election Protection 2022

Additional Information
Used for	The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) is seeking $10,000 to advance our voter protection efforts in the lead up to and during the 2022 Texas elections. Our work will include advocating for local and statewide pro-voter reforms, building local voter protection teams of trained attorneys and grassroots volunteers to monitor polling locations and staff our voter protection hotline, and conducting a robust public education campaign, with a goal of ensuring that every eligible Texan can cast a ballot that counts.
Benefits	Tens of thousands of voters are kept from voting each election cycle due to local election administration failures and voter suppression tactics. Through our election protection work, in addition to providing critical information and direct assistance to more than 20,000 individual voters, our efforts to prevent and correct systemic issues will benefit hundreds of thousands more.Long term, our election protection efforts shed light on the issues voters face before and duringTexas elections and enable the data collection needed to bolster our legal advocacy to improve elections policy, law, administration, and implementation.
Proposal Description	The right to vote is fundamental because it preserves all of our other rights. But in Texas, state leaders have undermined the power of voters for decades by making voting more difficult and gerrymandering district lines — both of which disproportionately affect voters of color, especially in Black and brown communities. For these reasons, Texas has time and again been deemed the most difficult state in which to vote in the country by policy experts. Driven by our belief that voting should be easy and accessible to all eligible Texans, TCRP will serve as the go-to hub for press, lawmakers and the public to receive accurate, up to date information about Texas elections and voting rights throughout the 2022 election cycle. We seek to build on the success of our election program in 2020, while using the lessons we learned during the previous cycle to guide our work and inform our programming. Across our four-phase program plan, TCRP has identified the following campaign goals for our 2022 Election Protection Program: -Continue to advance proactive, pro-voter solutions at the local level, through our Democracy from the Ground Up campaign, achieving dozens of new reforms for 2022 -Break down barriers to access for tens of thousands of voters during the primary and general election periods -Cultivate a strong, diverse movement of voting rights activists and allies; and -Educate Texans with the information they need to cast a ballot that counts — in 2022 and beyond. Across 14 months of election protection planning and implementation, our legal and advocacy teams aim to: -Field 20,000 inquiries from Texas voters through the Election Protection Hotlines and affiliated social media accounts throughout 2022; -Operate Command Centers in five major metro areas on Election Day — Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, McAllen, and Austin, which will also cover the rest of the state — prepared to address all serious issues that arise, including through litigation if necessary; -Build and lead an election protection coalition of 150 allied organizations, representing a multiracial and comprehensive list of voting rights and civil rights organizations, community organizers, legal organizations, and chaired by an executive committee to share decision-making power; -Station 2,000 volunteers at 1,000+ polling places on Election Day and during early voting, with the ultimate goal being to thoroughly cover the 12 most populated Texas counties, working in close partnership with Common Cause Texas; -Bring litigation, as needed, to force equality of access for voters, particularly voters of color, young voters and voters with disabilities; and -Create and run a comprehensive, multilingual paid communications program with 9.5 million media and digital impressions, targeting voters of color, young voters and voters with disabilities.