Defeating Minnesota’s Voter Restriction Amendment
An Inside View
On November 6, nineteen months after the mainstream political establishment declared it
impossible, Minnesota voters soundly defeated an initiative that would have required
voters to show government-issued identification at the polls. In May 2011, 80% of state
voters surveyed said they would approve the measure, but on Election Day Minnesotans
decisively rejected it by a margin of 54%-46%. Nearly 1 million voters had changed their
mind on photo ID. A coalition of community groups running a grassroots campaign of civic
engagement and voter education had defied conventional wisdom and turned around the
election. This briefing tells how the impossible was accomplished.
The Background: A National Attack on the Franchise
In 2010, in the depths of the recession and the midst of a polarized political environment,
Tea Party activists carried Republicans to victory in Minnesota. The GOP took majority
control of both houses of the state legislature. In the wake of this victory, when fiscal crisis
struck the state, the activists shut down state government for several weeks rather than
consider revenue increases. They pushed through elements of a radical right-wing agenda
to defund government and marginalize opposition. Voter suppression was one of their
strategies.
The attack on voting rights was happening across the country, driven by political
operatives eager to win elections by any means necessary. In 2011, two-thirds of the states
introduced legislation to impede the vote. According to Denise Lieberman, senior attorney
with the Advancement Project, 2012 brought “the largest assault on the right to vote since
the post-Reconstruction Era,” potentially affecting more than 5 million voters, in states
representing nearly two-thirds of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The
sweeping movement amounted to nothing less than an attack on the franchise, one likely to
raise barriers to voting for groups who typically supported progressive policies (such as
seniors, students, young people, immigrants, people of color, low-income and working
families) and to boost Republican turnout at the polls.
Targeting Minnesota
Minnesota was a prime target of the national voter suppression movement. While the state
has traditionally been viewed as a stronghold of progressive Democrats and moderate
Republicans, it is undergoing rapid demographic and cultural change. A generation ago,
Minnesota was virtually all white. Today, one in three children under the age of eighteen is
a person of color. The state’s racial transformation is producing social upheaval and
political polarization, making Minnesota an ideal test case for vote suppression. Razor-thin
electoral margins have decided recent elections. The two most recent statewide contests
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(electing Al Franken to the US Senate in 2008 and Mark Dayton as Governor in 2010) were
decided by recount.
In the spring of 2011, Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a Republican-sponsored
bill that required voters to present a photo ID and included a host of other restrictive
measures. The bill’s chief author (and state ALEC chair), Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, vowed to
bring it back in 2012 and circumvent the Governor by placing the measure on the ballot as
a constitutional amendment.
In their ambition to transform the political dynamics of Minnesota, the proponents of Voter
ID had crafted one of the toughest and most restrictive laws in the country. Every other
Voter ID law allowed exemptions for certain classes of voters, such as military voters,
absentee voters, nursing home residents and others, whereas the Minnesota measure
would have applied without exception to all voters. Many other states allow voters to
display expired or non-governmental IDs, but Minnesota’s proposed statute would have
required current government-issued ID, a much higher threshold. Other states focused on
photo identification for in-person voting, but the Minnesota amendment would have also
threatened same-day registration, mail-in ballots and absentee ballots. In a state whose
electorate is around three million, these draconian requirements would have affected more
than 700,000 voters.
And perhaps most importantly, while 32 states had introduced voter identification laws,
Minnesota was only the third to consider making such limitation a constitutional
amendment. Following the playbook developed by opponents of gay marriage, right-wing
strategists sought both to enshrine comprehensive voter restriction in the state’s
constitution, making it harder to amend or remove, and also to use the measure itself as a
rallying point to bring out conservative voters.
The Challenge: Mission Impossible
The conventional wisdom was that photo ID was phenomenally popular. A poll conducted
by the Minnesota Star Tribune in May 2011 had showed 80% public support for the
measure. Even 64% of Democrats supported it. One headline read, “Slam Dunk:
Minnesotans Love Photo ID.”
The long odds scared potential opponents. The political establishment felt the campaign
was unwinnable. Very few in the labor movement, Democratic party or progressive
community thought it was worth their time or money to fight the initiative. In their search
for a way out, some even considered blunting the appeal of the amendment by passing the
photo ID measure as a legislative statute, in the hopes that it could someday be repealed.
But a small group of community-based organizations were convinced that the amendment
could be defeated, based on four salient factors:
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
Support for photo ID was broad, but door-to-door canvassing revealed that it was
shallow. TakeAction Minnesota’s canvass, which began voter education on the issue
when the Star Tribune poll was released, found that people responded reflexively to
its common sense nature, but when they considered its consequences, their
commitment was easy to shake.

Voters did not see the current system as broken. Minnesota leads the nation in voter
turnout (76%+ in 2012), and has a healthy and well-functioning electoral system
ranked as the most democratic of all 50 states by the non-partisan FairVote. Far
from seeking change, most Minnesota voters were proud of their electoral system
and wanted to defend the state’s long-running democratic heritage.

Voter restriction advocates did not have a strong constituency or organization
behind them. Right wing think tanks had seeded concerns about voter fraud for
years, but had not built the necessary network of donors and activists to wage a
campaign. Because victory seemed assured, the conservative base was not
motivated to focus on the issue.

Opposition was latent but intense. As people learned how the amendment could
disenfranchise seniors, students, communities of color, and other traditionally
marginalized groups, they got fired up and wanted to fight. Community groups with
an authentic constituency could see a level of untapped grassroots passion that
could lead the campaign to victory – a force that the polls could not register.
Building the Campaign Infrastructure
By the time the 2012 legislative session opened, a small cadre of organizations had
coalesced around the goal of reframing the voter ID issue. Polling suggested that if we could
overcome the default response of many voters – that asking for ID was “just common sense”
– we could shift public opinion. TakeAction Minnesota, ISAIAH, Minnesotans for a Fair
Economy, SEIU, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and others pledged to fight a ballot
campaign against the amendment – and win. Press conferences, mass turnout to legislative
hearings, rallies, and protests all served to make the issue controversial, a tag the media
adopted early in session.
In the meantime the framework for a ballot campaign began to take shape. Joining the
groups named above, AARP, Minnesota AFL-CIO, ACLU, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits,
League of Women Voters, America Votes - Minnesota, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and
others came together to establish a separate 501(c)4, Our Vote Our Future. OVOF would
eventually grow to be more than 80 organizations representing one million Minnesotans.
By August the campaign had hired a full-time campaign manager with in-kind support from
SEIU. Other campaign staff were donated by partner organizations.
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Early fundraising for the campaign was difficult and it was clear that the effort would rely
heavily on the capacity of local organizations. With technical assistance and financial
support from some far-sighted national partners – including the Center for Community
Change, PICO, SEIU, National People’s Action and the State Capacity and Innovation Fund
(SCIF) –the coalition was able to build a sophisticated infrastructure to organize volunteers
and communicate with voters.
The Racial Subtext
Minnesota’s changing racial composition has been a destabilizing force in the last decade.
While strong and progressive representation of communities of color has begun to emerge,
there has also been a reactionary backlash on the part of working class whites who worry
that their government has been captured by the needs of “others.” These often unspoken
racial dynamics were the political subtext of the campaign.
Proponents used racial stereotypes to advance their case, suggesting that non-white voters
were illegally and fraudulently taking advantage of Minnesota’s democratic electoral
system. A banner ad posted by the leading proponents of the amendment showed a cartoon
line of “illegal” voters. First in line was an African-American man in a prison uniform; next,
a Latino dressed as a mariachi. In another ad, a series of billboards proclaimed, “Voter
Fraud is a Felony” and showed a black man behind bars. The rhetoric of proponents
warned repeatedly about the “liars, stealers, and cheats” who were taking our elections
from “us.” With these not-so-subtly coded messages, advocates of the amendment implied
that immigrants and African-Americans were stealing elections and must be stopped.
Opponents of the initiative were not free of racism, either. Some of the passivity and
fatalism of the progressive establishment may have derived from a belief that the
amendment, while bad, would primarily affect unnamed and unfortunate Others. Some
progressive organizations could not imagine how to persuade their predominantly white
membership to oppose Voter ID.
The community organizations that took on Voter ID, however, had strived over many years
to navigate the emerging multi-racial reality of Minnesota. This created a sense of
confidence and clarity about how forge new alliances and build a multi-racial coalition that
could speak to both white voters and voters of color. Some notable examples of these
alliances include:

ISAIAH’s work with the Stair Step Foundation/His Works United, a faith-based
institution in the African American community.

TakeAction Minnesota’s partnership with ex-offenders, Hmong community leaders
and Emerge, a job placement service, to organize community forums on the
amendment.
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
SEIU’s investment in Neighbors Organizing for Change, a grassroots organizing
group on the predominantly African-American North Side of Minneapolis that
knocked on 30,000 doors for the campaign.

Voices for Voting Rights, an alliance of grassroots organizations formed by the
Organizing Apprenticeship Project that used culture, music and video to educate
and energize diverse communities of color.
By creating fluid alignments, the campaign could speak to multiple communities and
demographics while maintaining a coherent movement to defeat the voter restriction
amendment. The emerging politics of Minnesota demands this kind of flexible, nimble,
creative movement-building, creating capacity in emerging communities of color while
speaking to the interests and values of white voters. The effort to defeat the voter
restriction amendment was one of the first times we truly put the multi-racial capacity that
has been building for years to the test in a state-wide political fight. And we won. However,
this does not mean we always led with a race message. Rather we used the alignments,
trust, capacity, and relationships built to create multiple centers of activity and power,
while maintaining unity of purpose.
Anatomy of Success: Key Ingredients in the Defeat of Voter ID
This was a long, hard campaign that peaked at exactly the right time. Polls showed
amendment opponents making steady, incremental progress for more than a year, but
none showed us in the lead until 72 hours before Election Day. By November 6, support for
the amendment had dropped from 80% to 46%, meaning that 1 million Minnesota voters
had changed their minds.
What made this come-from-behind victory possible? In hindsight, six critical ingredients
stand out:
1. Messaging and Messengers
Our first priority was to reframe the public debate about amendment. Polling showed that
most voters initially saw the amendment as a common sense solution to the problem of
voter fraud. But this same polling told us little about what to say to voters to change their
minds. Through field testing different messages, and through additional polling, we were
able to arrive at a core message: “costs, complications and consequences.” Within this triad,
we could emphasize different aspects to different voters. For example, with progressive
voters the consequences of the amendment for the elderly, poor, and people of color was
motivating. For more conservative voters, cost was a main concern. For rural voters,
complications of a new provisional ballot system were a prime issue.
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Although research indicates voter impersonation is negligible, we refused to be drawn into
debates about whether fraud exists and how much is acceptable. In short: we refused to say
the “F” word. Instead, we kept a laser-like focus on the amendment and its flaws and we
remained disciplined about our message. This put proponents off balance as they were
unprepared to talk about anything other than fraud.
In August we added a secondary message, “send it back”. This message, spoke to those who
were concerned about fraud, but who felt this amendment was poorly written.
As important as our message were our messengers. Our coalition of trusted organizations
and opinion leaders were credible messengers who could ask voters to take a second
look. Since we were asking voters to reconsider what they thought was common sense,
who was speaking for us was important.
2. Grassroots Conversations
One-on-one conversations with voters were the heart of our campaign. OVOF logged more
than 400,000 such contacts, chiefly by phone; coalition members conducted an additional
number that went unrecorded. The bulk of these conversations were conducted by
community volunteers rather than paid canvassers.
Voter conversations served two strategic purposes. First, they enabled us to test and hone
our messaging at an early stage without being totally reliant on polling. The response of
voters on the phones and at the doors gave us confidence that our message was working
even when the polling data was still equivocal. Secondly, the conversations were critical for
voter persuasion. Voter restriction is not a simple issue. Changing minds required credible,
well-trained volunteers who could think on their feet and refute the bogus arguments of
proponents while hewing to the core message of costs, complications, and consequences.
Campaign volunteers conducted more than 6,000 “shifts” amounting to nearly 20,000
hours on the phone. Their impact was decisive. On average, they flipped between 20% 30% of the voters they spoke to, pulling votes out of the Yes column and putting them in
the No column hundreds or even thousands of times a night. Until paid media went up in
mid-October, these conversations were the primary reason that support for voter ID
declined. In the end, the margin of victory was about 200,000 votes; our volunteers reached
twice that many households, and spoke at length with more than half the number.
3. Technology and Targeting
The combination of predictive dialer phone bank and a high-quality voter database –
provided by America Votes VAN – gave us the capacity to run our grassroots voter
campaign at scale. Each organization was able to manage its own voter contact program,
communicating to its own members and constituents, while feeding the outcomes of these
conversations into the central database. Because this was a persuasion campaign, we used
sophisticated modeling to identify likely Yes voters, targeted this universe for two months,
and made significant gains in converting them to No.
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4. Earned Media
Plenty of public figures thought this amendment was a bad idea, especially local elections
officials, local elected officials, and community leaders. Our communications team worked
hard to recruit these grassroots opinion leaders, particularly in the rural and nonmetropolitan parts of the state, and gave them a platform to share their stories in local
media. At the same time, the campaign deployed a group of prominent Minnesotans –
Governor Mark Dayton, former Gov. Arne Carlson (a Republican), Dr. Josie Johnson (a wellknown civil rights leader), former Secretary of State Joan Grow, and former Independence
Party gubernatorial candidates Tim Penny and Tom Horner -- who spoke for the opposition
at the statewide level.
One telling measure of the effectiveness of this work: 66 Minnesota newspapers endorsed a
No vote, while only one recommended voters vote Yes. Hundreds of articles casting doubt
on the wisdom of the amendment appeared in local and statewide press.
5. Fundraising
The campaign to defeat the voter ID amendment raised nearly $3 million. More than 10%
of this figure was in-kind contributions from coalition organizations. Most of the cash
raised arrived in September or later, once polls had started to shift in our favor. By
contrast, the vote Yes campaign raised $1.8 million, nearly 90% of which came from one
donor whose singular interest was to pass right to work legislation.
6. Paid Ads
Nearly all cash raised by the campaign was reserved for a paid media campaign in the last
three weeks before Election Day. Multiple ads ran on the web, radio, and TV. By far the
most effective ad featured current Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, and former
Governor Arne Carlson, a Republican. The statesmanship and bipartisanship illustrated by
this ad cut through a lot of election clutter. Voters regularly told us on the phones that this
ad made them think twice.
Table 1: Voter Restriction Polling
Star
KSTP 5
OVOF
Tribune Survey
Internal
USA
Poll
Public
Policy
Polling
Star
Tribune
Mason
Dixon
Dates
5/27/178/219/109/175/2011 19/2012 23/2012 11/2012 19/2012
Yes
80
65
59
56
52
No
18
28
40
39
44
Undecided
2
6
1
5
4
Public Star
KSTP
Public
Policy Tribune Survey Policy
Polling
USA
Polling
10/5- 10/23- 10/30- 11/28/2012 25/2012 31/2012 3/2012
51
53
48
46
43
41
48
51
6
6
4
3
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Building on Victory
Many analysts credit the Minnesota Voter Restriction amendment as a galvanizing force in
the elections, bringing people of color, students, and progressive voters to the polls in
greater numbers. It is a sweet irony that this initiative, intended by the GOP to boost
Republican voter turnout, had the exact opposite effect. In a repudiation of the
conservatives who dominated the legislature for the last two years, voters also voted down
a constitutional ban on gay marriage and handed over control of both state houses to the
Democrats. Minnesota now has a Democratic governor and legislature for the first time
since the late 1980s.
With an opening for reform, Minnesota’s movement for social justice and democracy is
considering several proactive changes to strengthen democracy in the state:
 The re-enfranchisement of ex-felons. This would make eligible more than 30,000
voters and would be a significant victory for racial justice.
 Institute early voting and modernize voter registration.
 Re-institute the state small donor match program (political contribution refund
program).
There is also a larger opportunity present. The emerging electorate of young people and
people of color that played such a decisive role in the 2012 elections has the potential to
become a powerful force for positive change – or to become alienated and disaffected. To
keep these voters engaged, we need to create vehicles for political participation that can
recruit, educate, and mobilize them on a broad scale. The organizations that led the fight
against voter ID are now positioned to create such a vehicle in Minnesota, if they can
muster the resources and will to rise to that challenge.
Lessons for the Field
The lessons of this campaign fall into several categories. Some are specific to the issue of
voter restriction, or to the local environment of Minnesota. But there are also some lessons
that are relevant, we believe, to the broader project of building democracy nationwide:
1. One-on-one conversations are the heart of persuasion. It was by talking to voters
individually that we figured out our message and learned that we could, in fact, win
this campaign. Organizing alone cannot persuade everyone. But when married with
top notch messaging, effective earned media, and paid media it can be the moral,
political and visionary center of a campaign.
2. Race matters. Voter restriction is about race and multi-racial organizing is essential.
Effective multi-racial organizing requires investment over years to build trust,
relationships, alliances, and capacity and is needed to navigate turbulent political
waters as racial demographics change rapidly. We did not do this work perfectly,
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but we did learn to embrace multiple strategies, centers of power, and messages
that contributed significantly to our victory.
3. Passion matters. While conservatives were almost categorically in favor of voter ID,
there was no passionate constituency for the measure. Conversely, we built a
powerful constituency to oppose voter restriction, linking the issues organizations
typically work on to the importance of democratic participation. At its height, the
campaign became an “all-in” moment that encompassed multi-generational phone
banks, rallies in immigrant communities, church services, rock concerts, lawn signs,
media events, and more. This movement energy became the propulsive force of the
campaign.
4. Long-term investment in “organizing organizations” pays dividends. Our campaign
would not have been possible without many years of investment in the development
of strong grassroots organizations with deep membership, trained leaders,
experienced staff, sophisticated communications expertise, and a shared
commitment to racial and economic justice. The organizations that formed the core
of the campaign had already worked together in multiple formations and developed
a high level of trust. This history allowed us to pool our individual strengths in a
collective effort that built new capacity and new relationships.
The idea that elections are a form of public conversation is a well-worn cliché. In reality,
most elections today are contests over which side can turn out more of its partisans. But
the battle over the voter ID amendment was a genuine debate, in which many Minnesota
voters came to change their minds in response to fact, argument, and passion. Democracy
was the victor.
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