Founded in 2014 by campaign veterans Ellen Kurz and Jeremy Bird, iVote works to secure voting rights by investing in campaigns to bring universal, automatic voter registration to multiple states and by electing voting rights champions to be the chief election administrator in the office of the Secretary of State in battleground states. iVote is on the offensive, working to elect pro-voting Secretaries of State in key battleground states. Whereas voting rights groups have relied on challenges in court after rights had been impinged, or defeating efforts to further erode rights, iVote takes a different tack – ‘flipping the script’ from playing defense on voter suppression efforts to going on offense.
In 2016, iVote ran a petition campaign in Nevada to put automatic voter registration on the ballot. After being successfully certified, iVote is now focused on working with partners to win the ballot initiative in November ’18. iVote is also working to advance several pieces of legislation that would put automatic voter registration on the ballot in more states. Earlier this year, iVote announced that they plan to spend $5 million in efforts to elect Democratic, pro-voting rights secretaries of state in seven target states of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa.