One key step to ensuring the business voice is heard throughout Illinois is encouraging your employees to engage, and helping to facilitate their participation, by promoting voter registration.  People fail to vote for a lot of reasons—lack of awareness, apathy, confusion, or the belief that “my vote won’t make a difference.”  No matter how well we educate and motivate our employees to vote, it’s important to remember that our work won’t count unless they are registered.  It takes inspiration plus registration to increase voter participation.  There are millions of eligible unregistered voters whose voices are not being heard especially in the business community. As a result, this is an area in which we can have a major impact.

This September 21-25, The Illinois Chamber will be participating in Employee Voter Registration Week (EVRW) and providing resources that you can use to help your employees get registered.  Our belief is that, when our member employees vote, the business community’s voice is heard. We have our first business friendly governor in a long time so now is more important than ever to make sure the business community’s voice is heard.

We are providing you with access to our Employees Vote Toolkit resources and outreach content to distribute to your employees in conjunction with this initiative.  Getting involved in this effort is as easy as notifying your employees about the 2015 EVRW initiative and encouraging them to register to vote.  Copy, paste, and use this content as your own—and let us know when you’ve done so!

Remember, our system is a government is of the people. Increased voter participation can and will improve how the system performs. The hope is that by encouraging your employees to register to vote, the business community will have a stronger voice in elections to come.

Nathan C. Hoffman

Illinois Chamber of Commerce

Advocacy Manager