Thank you, I am really excited to be here to tell you all more about this fantastic project. I want to tell you about Party at the Mailbox. We are mobilizing black voters with celebrations of community. So that's really the motivating spirit behind these, right? Celebrating community and that leading to turnout. So the motivation for this project, as Niki mentioned, came from the need to pivot because of the pandemic, right? Everyone's getting ready to vote in the 2020 primaries, and now all of a sudden, it's not really a safe to do so in the traditional manner of going to your local polling place. And so Baltimore switches to an all mail ballot election, and Niki decides this is an opportunity to try something new to get out the vote, right? Again, this idea was to celebrate community, to celebrate being part of the City of Baltimore, and that that should lead folks to go and participate. It's grounded, though, in a thing called election festivals that some other scholars have been testing since 2005. They started with a small experiment in Hooksett, New Hampshire, and then another one in New Haven, and then branched out to do it hundreds of times. And the idea is that they were doing randomized controlled trials, RCTs, which means that they are doing a treatment and a control. So this is very much like a medical trial, which I think we're all a lot more familiar with these days, because we're all talking about vaccines. So the idea is, you have a pool of potential participants, you randomly divide it up, one group is the treatment, and one group is the control. For a Party at the Polls, they would take two potential precincts at which to host the party, and then randomly assign one to have a party and one doesn't get a party. And then they would throw these parties at the treatment, polling places. They'd put up a tent, they'd have a DJ with music, they'd have free food, maybe a cotton candy machine. They'd have hot dogs and hamburgers. And they would advertise at this party all over the precinct, right? Maybe that was pieces of mail delivered to people, or social media, advertisements in the local paper. And so people heard, hey, on this day, during voting hours, there's going to be a little free party with food and celebration. And so folks would go to these parties, and they'd sit and eat and talk and dance. And overall, they found, hey, this really works, right, bringing people together just celebrate their neighborhood. And if that happens to be right next to a polling place, that increases participation. So Party at the Mailbox is kind of similar to and inspired by these election festivals that have been held between 2005 and 2018. But of course, you can't have an election festival if it's a vote by mail election. And you're probably like, okay, you've told us all this cool stuff about Party at the Mailbox, but what is the Party at the Mailbox exactly? So let me tell you, what Party at the Mailbox is. It's a box of stuff that people go, mostly educational materials, but then also celebratory things, a poster that says "I love Baltimore, so I vote," a coloring book and crayons to get younger members of the household involved. Noisemaker, balloons, a t shirt that says "Baltimore votes," right? Local treats like these Berger cookies, which I'm not really from Baltimore, but I'm assuming you all are like, Oh, yeah, Berger cookies, right? And so that's part of Niki's brilliance on this is that every box for every city we went to she's like, this is the thing that goes in the box, right? So if you wanted to get a box, you had to sign up. So that is part of the reason that there's all these community partners, right? And so they would say to people, Hey, there's this thing going on, go to this website and sign up. And we had people put in their name and address and their birth year. We were careful to try to not ask for too much personal information, like just the bare minimum so we can match them to the voter file because we don't want to freak people out that we're asking for all kinds of details about their identities. And then once we got those lists, the grad students matched them to the voter file. And then we randomized and so we had here are the people in the treatment group, they're going to get a box. And here are the people in the control group, they asked for a box, but we're not giving them one, right. And you can imagine there was a lot of people who wanted to get one of these boxes. There were also activities that weren't part of the box. There was a car caravan. Something again, a lot of you are probably familiar with. So West Baltimore had a 40-car caravan that drove through the neighborhood and Niki's voice was going out over the the loudspeaker encouraging people to vote. There was an election night dance party on Facebook, that got over 10,000 viewers. And so even if you didn't get a box, you could be part of this. So we are doing RCTs. Right, we are definitely doing the, you know, gold standard evaluation method. But the evaluation also included many other components. We did surveys in every city, where we asked people to respond to an online Qualtrics survey, and give us feedback about the program and and how they felt about it. We also did interviews with local voters and organizers from these partner organizations that Niki and her team were working with to conduct the effort. I mean, we also had zoom focus groups, where, again, we invited people in these communities to talk to us and share how they felt about voting, how they felt about Party at the Mailbox, and what kinds of other effects we could see. So in the RCT, we can measure whether turnout goes up. But in these other methods of collecting data, we can see how did it make people feel? Did it make them feel prouder of being a member of their community? Did it enhance their feelings of identity as voters? Did it make them feel like they had higher levels of political efficacy? And so we can really get at all the different ways in which we think Party at the Mailbox was affecting people. So we go into the field expecting that this Party at the Mailbox idea that Niki comes up with is going to create a celebratory community, it's going to make people feel a stronger feeling of political efficacy, it's going to make them feel more a member of their community and a stronger identity as voters, and it's going to make them more likely to vote. So we wanted to know, okay, did this work? So right now, I'm focusing on the pilot, which is the June 2020, primary in the city of Maryland. We are doing our quantitative analysis using validated turnout data that we get from the state. And then we're also doing this qualitative analysis. So let me first tell you what happened with the validated turnout data. And before I go there, I want to give you a definition of who's at these parties, right? So traditional party at your house, you're the host, and you also have your guests. So we are labeling as hosts, the people who signed up to get a box. And then we have the guests at the party. And here we're defining that as anybody else in your household. And so the idea here is, even if you didn't know about Party at the Mailbox, once that box shows up at your house, now you're in the treatment group. And so what we're really fabulously impressed by when we look at the data, is how much Party at the Mailbox increase the turnout of guests, right? Not particularly surprising, the people who asked for a box, whether they're in the treatment or control group, their high propensity, and so there's just not a lot of room for their turnout to go higher, right? They're already voting right in the high 80s, low 90s percentages. But the guests, right, the people who interacted with this box without expecting it to show up. That's where we really see the movement, particularly low propensity guests, where we are seeing the increase in turnout. And while that was not exactly what we expected, it is so logical. When we look at our qualitative data, our interviews and our focus groups, here's where we start to get the themes that are coming out about community and duty to community. So now we're really getting an understanding of the mechanism by which Party at the Mailbox is having all these effects on people's ad attitudes and behaviors. So we find that the box, again, is creating these new avenues of communication, to talk to other people, that it created this idea or reinforced this idea as voting as a community effort as making people feel part of their local communities. And part of that was because as I mentioned, Niki and her team made, took so much care to make the boxes feel local, that they had local items in them, right. That they, that they felt like, this is something local. This is not some national organization, parachuting in and telling us what to do. Tthis is us, right? We find a lot of evidence that the media campaign was successful, that people heard about it and heard, heard about it in a way that made them excited about voting, especially through social media. And really understood it as a message about, I'm part of this community, and I want to go out and vote as a member of this community, right. So really thinking about it now as Party at the Mailbox encourages voting as a celebration of community. That is the fabulous Part at the Mailbox project and all the evaluation that we're doing. Thanks to Niki's fantastic idea and the work of dozens and dozens of people, and I'm ready to take some questions.