Something as important as democracy shouldn’t just be confined to the halls of Congress or the chambers of your local city council.
It’s a good thing, then, that places like Mariya Genzel’s living room exist. And her kitchen. And sometimes her backyard.
For the past decade, those locations, along with Genzel’s Mountain View front porch, have been the center of an all-volunteer get-out-the-vote campaign responsible for sending more than 400,000 handwritten postcards and letters to voters across the country.
“It's going to sound very trite, but if not us, then who?” Genzel said.
In the run up to the 2016 presidential election, Genzel said “bells were going off” as she listened to some of the things said on the campaign trail. Genzel was a teenager in the 1990s when her family fled the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States. Genzel felt compelled to do more to help protect democracy in her adopted country. She began participating in postcard-writing campaigns urging people to register and vote.
“I don't have delusions that this will transform this person's life," Genzel said. "But they see a postcard coming in handwritten from a person and will hopefully make them stop and think, 'Oh, voting is important, registering to vote is important. Somebody took the time to do this, in a way that a text or email wouldn’t."
Still, she could only write so many letters herself. Leveraging her project management skills from the tech industry, Genzel devised a system to involve others easily.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
From political organizations across the country, Genzel would get lists of names and addresses, then prepare packets filled with postcards for people to pick up on her doorstep. Participants could also come to her house once a week for a postcard-writing party.
Local
“We just passed 400,000 letters and postcards in April,” Genzel said.
While Genzel's political leanings largely determine who gets her postcards, she is not at all bothered if it encourages someone with different opinions to vote.
“It's a civil responsibility that we should all do," she said. "So I'm happy that people go out and vote.”
