Amid the quiet hum of papers shuffling and pens scratching, a cozy living room transforms into a workshop of civic engagement every week. Eager volunteers of all ages sit around a cluster of tables, each surface scattered with stickers, writing supplies, and a list of addresses to mail postcards to. The silence is disturbed every couple of minutes by the sound of a bell ringing followed by cheering from everyone, signaling that another 10 postcards have been written.
For the past seven years, Mountain View local Mariya Genzel has been hosting postcard-writing “parties,” where attendees handwrite dozens of letters and postcards to voters all over the country, encouraging them to participate in upcoming elections. According to Genzel, the initiative has written and delivered nearly 500,000 postcards in total, with the upcoming presidential election leading to a record-high volume of 27,000 postcards delivered per month.
“Your vote is your way to speak up for the things that you consider valuable,” Genzel told Anthro. “It’s the bare minimum that we can do to make change in a democracy. If we don’t vote, how can we expect the government to do what we would like?”
As an immigrant from the Soviet Union, Genzel has been trying to get the local community to recognize the importance of voting in order to get more people to vote. According to the California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, 71.6% of Santa Clara County residents voted in the 2020 presidential election,
“Being a good citizen is about being involved in the community, and understanding what you can do for others,” Genzel said. “Immigrants like myself tend to vote at high rates because we understand so much better how important it [voting] is. In many other places, you don’t get that opportunity.”
Genzel said her postcard parties started out small but have grown over the years – experiencing its largest growth during the COVID-19 pandemic when she would set packages of postcard-writing supplies on her porch for people to pick up and write at home.
“During the pandemic, I gathered people who were trying to desperately do something about the Trump administration and all the bad things that were happening in federal and state government,” Genzel said. “They came to my door to pick up a package to write from home. Last I counted, this group consisted of 1200 people, and I was one of the few people [in the Bay Area] who organized such an event.”
According to Genzel, witnessing the lack of voters at the ballot box during the 2016 presidential election was a primary motivation to start up the postcard writing campaign.
“Being an election officer on that day was very depressing, and after that, for about a year, I couldn’t do anything,” Genzel said. “When the midterm elections were starting up in 2017, I thought, okay, I’m gonna do something.”
Although based in California, the postcards written at these events have a target audience larger than just the local community. Genzel said the postcards are sent to encourage voters around the country and for elections beyond just those in the mainstream.
“People don’t realize this but there are thousands of elections every year across the country in different states and on different levels,” Genzel said. “The 2017 Virginia [gubernatorial] election was the first election in which I did this [postcard writing].”
According to Genzel, the methods that the event uses are always changing — with data and statistics driving the process of determining how to create the largest impact among voters.
“The postcards we are sending to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this year are part of a randomized control trial — we’re checking to see whether this particular program of encouraging voting actually works,” Genzel said. “In general, letters and postcards have somewhere between 0.6 to 1.2% effectiveness, and that means that people who receive them, they’re more likely to come out and vote by that percentage.”
Although the percentages may seem low, Genzel said that even seemingly small percentages can have significant effects when tiny margins decide elections.
“The most effective method [to increase voting], which is canvassing, only increases voting rates by 5%, so we’re only talking small percentages,” Genzel said. “This sounds very discouraging, but only a small number of votes are required to swing elections these days. Even in Santa Clara County, 11 votes determined the congressional race.”
Editor’s Note: This story was edited to clarify that all of Genzel’s postcard sessions followed COVID-19 protocol. This story was also edited to clarify that the postcard sessions were among a relatively few in the Bay Area.