I became an unsolicited pen pal for democracy in 2018, writing letters and postcards to strangers ahead of that year’s midterm elections.
A few months earlier, I had marched for women, for science, for immigrants, for Muslims, and I decided that marching wasn’t enough — I needed to engage individual Americans to elect politicians who shared my values.
So in September of that year, I attended a grassroots volunteer voter outreach event hosted by an organization called Civic Sundays in Los Angeles. We learned how to canvass, call and text potential voters, and write engaging postcards.
I’d never heard of writing postcards to encourage strangers to vote, but I was fascinated by the idea of saving democracy through analog means. Civic Sunday and many of the other organizations, many of which launched after the 2016 presidential election, provide volunteers with lists of names and addresses of registered voters. The writers provide pens, stamps and sometimes the postcards themselves.
I joined a large table of people with professional glitter and magic marker skills. Their postcards looked like illuminated manuscripts, but I struggled to make mine legible. My fourth-grade teacher once told me my handwriting resembled a hostage taker’s ransom note, but I was fortunate enough to not have to take a handwriting test to sit at the postcard table (though some organizations do require one).
I thought the work was rather sound, but I wasn’t sold on the idea of trying to involve people who weren’t going to vote.
The more postcards I wrote, the more questions I had: Who are these people who rarely vote? Why aren’t they fulfilling their civic duty? If I looked up their addresses on Google Maps, what would I see? Unmowed lawns? Gated mansions?
I was eager to find out who these people were, shirking their civic responsibility, but we had clear instructions: do not get involved personally with the recipients of the letters. Instead, we followed a clear and concise script of just a few sentences.
I participated in another postcard campaign for the 2020 presidential election, this time specifically soliciting names from the battleground state of Michigan. As I wrote to strangers, I grew increasingly annoyed, imagining them enjoying their weekends without the slightest hint of voting guilt, and fretting that a stamp with a cat on it would offend them.
When I mentioned these frustrations to a cynical friend, he recommended that I read Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s famous 1966 “Letter to a Young Activist.” Since my friend is not the kind of person who would write postcards to strangers, I should have been skeptical. Predictably, Merton’s words did not reassure me about the fate of my postcard. “Never rest on the expectation of results,” he wrote. “When you are doing the kind of work you have undertaken, essentially apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work is manifestly worthless, that it may produce no results at all, or that it may produce the opposite of what you expected.”
After reading Merton’s letter, I didn’t write to voters in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, or anywhere else for several months who had flouted the law.
But with the 2024 election campaign underway and the country’s future once again on the ballot, I requested another postcard list.
This time, one of the options was to write to people in California, the state I live in. This felt more like writing to a neighbor, rather than a complete stranger far away. When I had the list and started reading the names and addresses, I realized that some of my postcards would be sent to people who live near the town where I work.
And then it happened: I recognized a name. The Gen Z youth I needed to encourage to vote was one of my thoughtful and talented students.
At last, I found answers about the people I was writing to. They were just like us: the unmarried singles and the elders of large families, the electric car drivers and the big truck drivers, the charming people and the annoying people, the neighbors whose music is too loud but who are nice to their kids. People who are so busy with life that they forget to vote or choose not to vote.
Recognizing just one name convinced me that I had to keep writing these letters about democracy, keep reminding people that their vote matters, even if they aren’t listening or don’t want to hear. With new insight into Merton’s famous letters, I had to trust, in his words, “the value, the correctness, the truth of the work itself.”
Melissa Wall is a journalism professor at California State University, Northridge, who studies public engagement in the news. This article was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.