News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 22, 2026
10:00 am ET

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Mo Banks
mo.banks@andrewgoodman.org
(201) 502-6144

The Andrew Goodman Foundation and ACLU to Put Nearly 200 Student Volunteers at Polling Places on Election Day

Sixty-two years after Andrew Goodman was murdered in Mississippi for protecting the right to vote, trained student observers will observe polling places in four crucial states across the South for the 2026 midterm elections.

JACKSON, Miss. — The Andrew Goodman Foundation (AGF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced today that they will train and place 195 college students as Andrew Goodman Election Observers in polling places across four states on November 3, where they will be eyes on the ground to make sure voters rights are protected.

Students will serve as nonpartisan poll observers in Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi. In Arkansas, where state law prohibits nonpartisan organizations from placing poll observers, students will support absentee ballot curing and watch the count and the certification. Together they will cover 44 precincts in counties where more than five million people vote.

The Andrew Goodman Foundation was created in 1966 by Robert and Carolyn Goodman, whose twenty-year-old son was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi, alongside James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner. The three had driven to Neshoba County to document the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, where Black Mississippians had been learning what they needed to know to register to vote. Mt. Zion still stands. It held its sixty-second annual memorial service for the three men this June.

This November, students from Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas will be observing polling places and doing what Goodman was doing. Watching, writing down what they witness, and protecting civil rights.

 “When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, The Andrew Goodman Foundation and our campus and coalition partners went to work knocking down the barriers that went up right after. Our campus teams answered then. The Court has gutted it again, and they are answering again. We are grateful to have the ACLU beside us, and we are not waiting to see how this goes. Students’ voices and votes will remain a powerful force in our democracy, “ said Christina Sanders, Managing Director of The Andrew Goodman Foundation.

The announcement comes four months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision voters have used for decades to challenge discriminatory election practices.

“In a democracy, every eligible voter has the right to cast a ballot without intimidation and to have it counted. That right is under a coordinated attack. It takes lawyers, and lawyers need people in the room. This November, students trained by the ACLU and The Andrew Goodman Foundation will be at polling places in four states, watching what happens and protecting civil rights,” said Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi.

The partnership runs through the ACLU Southern Collective and its Southern Voting Project. Four Southern affiliates are running the program, and each leads implementation in its own state.

Students are recruited on their own campuses by Andrew Goodman Ambassadors and placed, at their campus voting site, in their local community, or at a precinct within a few miles of it. They will be trained, serve in pairs, and report what they witness through the ACLU affiliate’s system, the same one that feeds the organization’s legal and rapid response work. Every state has its own safety plan, and Andrew Goodman Alumni will be in the field on Election Day.

“Our Andrew Goodman Ambassadors are at the forefront of ensuring election access for their campus communities. More than five million people live in the counties where our students will be observing on November 3. Our Andrew Goodman Ambassadors will be at their precincts and will get the right people involved if anything happens,” said Evan Wayne, Program Manager for Impact at The Andrew Goodman Foundation.

The Andrew Goodman Foundation network spans 71 campuses in 25 states and Washington, D.C., including 27 across the South, and reaches roughly one million students.

If you would like to serve as a poll observer in Georgia, Mississippi, and Arkansas, use this link to sign up: https://act.aclu.org/a/ep-student-pollobs-training

If you would like to serve as a poll observer in Florida, sign up here: https://www.mobilize.us/aclufl/event/980756/ 

The program is part of the ACLU’s election safeguarding effort announced in June, the largest in the organization’s history for a midterm cycle.

Recruitment opens in September. Students interested in serving, email Evan Wayne at evan.malbrough@andrewgoodman.org 

About The Andrew Goodman Foundation

The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s mission is to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy by training the next generation of leaders, engaging young voters, and challenging restrictive voter suppression laws. The organization is named after Andrew Goodman, a Freedom Summer volunteer and champion of equality and voting rights who was murdered, alongside James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner, by the KKK in 1964 while registering Black Americans to vote in Mississippi. To learn more, visit www.andrewgoodman.org.

About the ACLU

The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union – beyond one person, party, or side. Our mission is to realize this promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees. For over 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Whether it’s ending mass incarceration, achieving full equality for the LGBTQ+ community, advancing racial justice, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties and civil rights cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach. With nearly two million members, activists, and supporters, the ACLU is a nationwide organization that fights tirelessly in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., for the principle that every individual’s rights must be protected equally under the law, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, national origin, and record of arrest or conviction.  

About the ACLU Southern Collective

In 2019, the ACLU launched the Southern Collective (SoColl), a collaborative multi-state initiative project of the national office and the ACLU affiliates of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The Collective works to address the challenges in the South that are rooted in its unique history of racial oppression and violence and equally remarkable history of civil rights struggles and victories. It focuses on advancing high-impact, collaborative initiatives across the region to pave the way for racial justice nationwide. SoColl has been running its Southern Voting Project with southern affiliates to protect the right to vote since 2020, and will be out in full force across the South again this election in the heart of the fight for voting rights in America.

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