About
Free Our Vote is a non-profit dedicated to expanding voting rights, supporting economic opportunities, and improving second chances for communities impacted by the criminal legal system. Since their establishment in 2020, their data-driven programming has reached more than one million eligible voters with past convictions, with the help of more than a dozen on-the-ground partners.
The scale of the problem is rooted in both law and information: while an estimated 2% of the U.S. voting-age population is legally disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, the impact is disproportionately concentrated, with some states disenfranchising over 10% of their Black adult population (The Sentencing Project).
Free Our Vote bridges the “information gap” between legal eligibility and the actual ability to cast a ballot, as personalized campaigns have been shown to boost registration rates by up to 13%, and targeted debt relief can boost participation by up to 26%.
The Challenge:
To identify and contact eligible voters, Free Our Vote must navigate a fragmented landscape of public records. In Michigan alone, the project required analyzing an estimated 650,000 court filings per year, spanning four decades.
“The biggest challenge we faced was the sheer volume and decentralization of the data,” says Tyler Richardett, CTO, Free Our Vote. “Manually collecting these records across dozens of different jurisdictions was a massive technical bottleneck that kept us from focusing on our primary mission: outreach.”
The Solution:
Free Our Vote partnered with Bright Data to automate the collection of these critical public records. By utilizing Bright Data’s robust proxy infrastructure, the organization was able to:
- Automate Data Extraction: Seamlessly pull court records from disparate county and state databases.
- Scale Operations: Transition from manual, small-batch collection to processing hundreds of thousands of records simultaneously.
- Focus Resources: Shift engineering time away from building custom scrapers and toward data analysis and voter communication.
The Impact:
The partnership has fundamentally changed the speed at which Free Our Vote can operate. By leveraging Bright Data’s technology, the organization has achieved:
- Record-Breaking Collection: Successfully processed 5,000,000+ records in Pennsylvania 150,000+ (and counting) records in Michigan.
- Clearer Voter Insights: In Michigan, Free Our Vote is now on track to contact tens of thousands of individuals to clarify their voting status.
- Preparation for 2026: The organization is positioned to impact voter turnout for the November 2026 elections at an unprecedented scale.
“Before partnering with The Bright Initiative, a meaningful chunk of our technical capacity was consumed just by the problem of access itself. Partnering with Bright Data let us offload that burden to infrastructure built for it, which freed us to focus more on ensuring the right messaging and resources meet the right people.” – Tyler Richardett, CTO, Free Our Vote
