Introducing Vote Drives

Like you can create your campaigns with petitions, now you can create your own vote registration, pledge, and protection drives from your phone.

We call them vote drives for short, but they allow you to raise real votes for candidates you want to see win in the fall. Billie Eilish chose this technology in 2020 as it was the easiest way for her fans to both promise her that they'd show up and vote, and to check their registrations and find where to vote on Election Day.

1. How to Create a Vote Drive

1. Text driveCreate your own voter registration and pledge drive to Resistbot. You'll be prompted for a location where your candidate is running. This is so we can search local ballots. A city and state or a zip code works fine here.
2. Once you confirm the location, you'll be prompted to enter the last name of your candidate, e.g., Beshear.
3. The bot should locate the candidate's name and the office they're running for. Respond yes when you see the correct candidate!
4. You'll be prompted to write an argument for their candidacy. This is your chance to tell people why voting for this person matters to you. Write a personal story, write about one or more issues that matter to you and the folks you're organizing, or anything you'd tell folks while canvassing or making phone calls.

Once you're done, you'll get a nice image to share like this one:

Each person who signs your drive will get one of these that they can share, too!

As with petitions, all vote drives also have a web page for easy sharing.

2. How to Win Votes

If you have followers, they'll all be texted when you create your drive, giving you an excellent head start. You win followers and build lasting power on Resistbot the more campaigns you create over time.

You can use the inviteAsk your friends to join Resistbot! keyword on the bot to send individual invitations to your friends via email or text. You can also use the promoteUse coins to promote a campaign you care about! keyword to spend coins to promote your drive to other Resistbot members. However, most successful organizers will leverage their social media to share the text code for the drive. TikToks or Instagram reels are an excellent medium to make an argument for your candidate, and close the video with your call to action. Impress upon folks that even if they already know where to go to vote or don't think they need to pledge to vote or endorse your candidate, growing vote drives have second-order effects. Anyone pledging to vote will be prompted to share and promote just as you did, and the larger the drives get, the more awareness they'll get.

3. What's the point of vote drives?

Every person who joins your vote drive will be prompted to check their registration immediately and instantly via Resistbot. The earlier folks can identify problems with their voting registration, the more likely it can be fixed before Election Day. Many states are notorious for indiscriminately purging the voter rolls, especially those who may not have voted in the last few elections. State laws vary, but phone calls or door-knocking in the last week before the election will typically not solve these problems.

And when it comes to getting ballots cast, even in the largest quadrennial Presidential elections, with thousands of organizations working on voter turnout efforts, still 1 of 3 Americans didn't vote. That number explodes in smaller and off-year races. Usually, organizations will pour effort into the last week or two before an election. With Resistbot, you can spend the months before an election building your drive up. The bot will remind everyone you get to pledge at the right time so that you can focus your valuable hours elsewhere.

In study, after study, after study, these simple reminders were proven. The smaller the election, the more magnified the effect.

Need help getting started? We're here to help! Contact support at resist.bot with any questions.

Want to learn how to build persistent organizing power with Resistbot? Move on to our organizer guide.