Wondering how to get involved in elections? This Mesa woman sends voters postcards

For Peg Adams of Mesa, writing postcards to voters is more than just her civic contribution—it’s also led to new friends.

 Volunteering for a campaign doesn’t always look like knocking on people’s doors and cold-calling strangers. 

For people like Peg Adams of Mesa, it looks like writing and sending postcards to voters to encourage people to cast their ballots. 

Adams, 65, told The Copper Courier that in 2017 she came across a Facebook page called Postcards for America that included documents on how to write to state representatives, and she decided to get involved because of Donald Trump’s presidential win in 2016.

“I figured that I needed to do something to change the way that things were going and didn’t want to see him get elected again,” she said. 

A postcard Peg Adams made with Postcards to Voters for Georgia voters. (Photo courtesy of Peg Adams)

She then saw a group called Postcards to Voters that, at the time, was asking people to write postcards to Georgia residents, encouraging them to vote for Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who was running for US House there. 

One of the organizers for that effort sent her a sample script and addresses to send postcards to—and that was the beginning of Adams’ activism with postcards.

She has since been involved with multiple postcard groups and campaigns—all the way from the US Senate to school board races—and now sometimes even crafts her own postcards to send instead of purchasing ones. 

How the process works

Adams said to get involved, find an organization that’s running a postcard campaign and check out their website for how to join. Here are some places to start:

• Postcards for America
• Postcards to Voters
• Postcards to Swing States
• Activate America
• Vote Forward (letter-writing)
• Northeast Arizona Native Democrats
• Black Voters Matter

The groups will pass along the addresses and sample script for the postcards. The volunteer is usually responsible for the postcards and stamps. 

Adams said people can buy voter postcards online from places like Amazon or Etsy, but they can also make their own using cardstock. She goes the extra mile to spruce hers up. 

“I decorate it with stickers and washi tape, write things like ‘bee a voter’ with bumblebees or whatever else I can think of that’s kind of a voting slogan,” Adams said. 

What do the postcards do?

Adams said she feels good about the work she does because she’s been told the postcards have successfully motivated voters. 

“A lot of the campaigns I’ve written for over the years have come back and showed us pictures of people that drove up to a voting place with the postcard in their hand and said, ‘Can I vote for this person here?’ And that was amazing to me when I saw that,” she said. 

Adams said candidates have also thanked them for making a difference, especially when turnout in an election was higher than previous years or when a candidate won by a small margin. 

“I choose a lot of times to write more cards for the smaller races like school board or in a rural area where there may not be as many people that know about the race in order for more people to know about it,” she said. 

Other benefits of postcards

For Adams, writing postcards to voters hasn’t just given her a way to contribute to preserving democracy—it’s also led to new friends. 

Through Facebook, she met two women in Georgia and Idaho who also volunteer in postcard campaigns, and they often check in with each other on Messenger. They swapped addresses with each other and have sent each other packets of postcards and “other goodies.” 

Adams said she sometimes brings her postcard materials over to a friend’s house in Arizona and they work on them together. She’s also worked on them at scrapbooking meetup nights and enjoyed having other people ask about them.

Sometimes she attends in-person meetups run by campaigns that bring people together to work on postcards. Mobilize, a platform that advertises volunteer opportunities, lists many postcard events. 

“I never really did anything in person with any other people until just recently, because when Trump was in the White House and everything seemed kind of bleak, I didn’t really know of anyone around here that was interested,” she said. “But it seems like things have changed a lot in the last month or two.”

Adams said for anyone thinking about taking up writing postcards, it’s always possible to start small and try it out before committing more time. She also said it’s an easy way for introverts to get involved in causes they care about. 

“It’s easier than phone banking or text banking,”she said. “If … you don’t really want to deal with other humans, you don’t have to.” 

Are you ready to vote? Make sure to check your voter registration status, see who’s on your ballot, and make a voting plan here.

READ MORE: How to volunteer for a political campaign as an introvert