WE THE VETERANS FOUNDATION

Vet the Vote is a national campaign to recruit veterans and military family members to become the next generation of poll workers. We believe doing so not only fills critical needs for our elections to run smoothly (e.g., poll workers) but also increases overall confidence in our elections due to the trust earned by the veteran and military family community through their service to the nation. This theory has now been validated by a study recently published by the University of Maryland titled, "Recruiting Veterans and Military Family Members Improves Confidence in Elections." Our first campaign around the 2022 elections was a resounding success, recruiting over 63,500 new volunteers to serve as poll workers (representing about half of the projected national gap coming into the cycle), building a coalition of 30+ corporate and nonprofit organizations, predominantly veteran and military family support and engagement organizations, and reaching 20M+ Americans through social, podcast, print, and broadcast media. This work continued throughout 2023, covering off-cycle elections and preparing for the 2024 presidential through deeper engagement with local and state election officials across the country.

Innovating a Prevention Ecosystem. The Prevention Ecosystem program builds on the strengths and capabilities of the veteran and military family community to sustainably increase overall resistance and resilience to hostile foreign influence and violent extremist groups that seek to sow division, implement information and influence operations, and incite our community members to violence. In 2023, we fully built-out an ecosystem of partners from across government, tech, academia, and other mission-aligned organizations to launch, resource, and grow research-backed initiatives. Our goal is to continue to mobilize the community towards specific programs and initiatives which will have a measurable impact on the community, both in terms of reducing participation in targeted violence, but also, critically, in ensuring the maintenance of the veteran and military family reputation and brand. In 2023 we grew our three quarterly working groups: information and influence operations, targeted violence prevention (TVP), and patriotic participation. WTVMF partnered with PsychArmor to turn our information operations working group topics into microlearnings, helping to further educate the veteran and military family population on hostile influence campaigns to continue strengthening our national security.