[1] Democracy Matters believes that it is imperative to reduce the overwhelming influence of big private and corporate money in elections and necessary to empower ordinary people—regardless of race, gender, and/or socio-economic status—to be able to participate meaningfully in the electoral and political process.
When a student is selected as an intern, Democracy Matters offers individually-crafted training in political organizing, theory, and communication.
[1] Once students have undergone preliminary training, they sets forth to create (or maintain if already existence) a Democracy Matters chapter at their university.
Throughout its existence, Democracy Matters has worked with more than 800 interns and brought thousands of other affiliated students into the campaign finance fight.
[5] Among the many tactics used are: organizing movie screenings, bringing in well known lecturers, facilitating educational panels, and actively writing legislation and lobbying for reform on local and state levels.
Furthermore, they can use their time working on issues important to the people they represent rather than spending many hours each day on the phone "dialing for dollars" or attending fundraisers.
These interns were tasked with attending presidential candidates' events to ask them questions about where they stood on the issue of public financing and campaign finance reform more broadly; building new chapters at large universities in the respective states to create pressure once the school year began; and creating coalitions with local leaders towards the end of building student-adult groups for reform.
[10] The organization also attempted to get presidential candidates to sign the "Restore Democracy" pledge card, which read "I support restoring democracy by publicly financing elections and taking big money out of politics.”[11] During the course of this program, the group became the first organization to get Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton on the record supporting public financing of elections.
The first, eNews, highlights the organization's most active student chapters and details recent events in the world of campaign finance.