Could Corporate New Voter-Drive Initiatives Backfire?

After shunning politics for years, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, launched a voter registration and education campaign targeted at its 1.3 million employees.

Wal-Mart’s initiative is not without precedent. A growing number of corporations, including Nationwide, ExxonMobil and DaimlerChrysler, have organized in-house voter registration efforts, making it easy for workers to download voter-registration forms and apply for absentee ballots.

But it takes more than handing out a few forms to get people to the polls. Companies thinking that with a little help their employees will vote for candidates who support the corporation’s goals are being unrealistic. Creating an emotional allegiance to your issues so that employees know whom to vote for without being told whom to vote for is an entirely different and long-term endeavor. Company officials have to take the time to teach employees about the political process and the industry issues that affect them.

The real work of creating a culture of civic engagement takes time and effort. I directed the efforts of employee volunteers to register their colleagues to vote for nine years as manager of a Fortune 500 corporate employee grassroots program. In that time, our nonpartisan voter registration efforts resulted in more than 10,000 new voters.

It would be useful to survey the employees of corporations that have enthusiastically embraced voter registration to find out how many actually considered a candidate’s position on their company’s issues when casting their vote. I’ll bet the answer is very few. Companies have to earn their employees’ allegiance.