Acronym

Many people at the Global Summit for Social Responsibility last week asked me about coalitions and industry-wide efforts that are underway and how they can learn more about them. I’ll be blogging more about such efforts in response, and anyone can access an ever-growing list of association and nonprofit coalitions working on a wide range of social, environmental and economic issues on ASAE & The Center’s Social Responsibility website.

One joint effort I’m hearing about relates to voting—not the usual voter recruitment campaigns but the access to and ability to cast your vote. In this week’s North Carolina and Indiana primaries, for instance, a Voter Protection Hotline created by the Election Protection Coalition—the largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition in the U.S.—took almost 800 calls about voting problems from residents in both states.

The coalition also uses hundreds of volunteers to monitor polling places during primaries, answer questions from confused residents, and most recently paid close attention to problems related to Indiana’s controversial new requirement that a voter produce a government-issued photo identification. The group is especially concerned about voters who were turned away by undertrained poll workers giving incorrect information, voting machine problems, and outdated or wrong voter registration rolls—the most common problems found in numerous state primaries, according to the coalition.

Participants in the coalition vary state-to-state, but national partners include the nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Right's Voting Rights Project, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.