The New Pennsylvania Project, a voting rights organization, opened its first Bucks County office in Bensalem on Thursday.
Founded in 2021, New Pennsylvania Project aids in voter registration, civic education and mobilization, focusing on historically disenfranchised people such as Black, Indigenous and other people of color, immigrant communities, and youth. The organization has eight offices statewide with headquarters in Chester. The nonpartisan pro-democracy organization aims to register voters, educate and engage them, and ensure they get to the polls for all elections.
Kadida Kenner, the founding CEO of New Pennsylvania Project, said the organization specifically chose to reside in Bensalem because there is a proportionately larger demographic of people of color than Bucks County as a whole. Additionally, according to the America Votes voter file and U.S. census data (CVAP), as of 2024 in Bucks County, 35.8% of Black, Indigenous and other communities of color are not registered to vote compared to 4.6% of their white counterparts, which is higher than the statewide 18 percentage point gap.
“It’s really about meeting people where they are,” Kenner said. “And, if that means we’re going to an NAACP meeting or we’re going to a cultural festival, which we’ve done in Bucks County, we want to be where the people are, and we want to talk to them about getting registered to vote.”
In Pennsylvania, people only need valid forms of identification the first time they vote, or the first time they vote in a new precinct. Yet the commonwealth still lacks critical voter protections, Kenner said. According to the Movement Advancement Project, while many states have fully automatic voter registration when people transact with certain agencies such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, Pennsylvania’s automatic voter registration is partial, meaning people can opt-out at the time of the current agency transaction. According to Rock the Vote, PA also does not allow same-day voter registration, registration during early voting, or registration on election day, while some states allow all three.
Kenner added that voter registration is only one part of New Pennsylvania Project’s mission. Talking to about 15 people who showed up to celebrate the office opening, Kenner said that one of their biggest issues is the people in the communities the organization tends to reside in are least likely to show up at the polls after they help register them. Because of this, the organization aims to stay in constant contact with voters.
“It does no good for us as an organization to have assisted more than 55,000 people in getting registered to vote if they don’t actually show up to the polls, so that’s some of the work that we’re doing right now,” Kenner said.
Another issue the organization faces, Kenner said, is that 19% of people they help register to vote choose not to belong to either of the major political parties, even when they provide education that they would not be able to vote in the primaries. In the month of July, 37% of people the organization registered to vote chose not to belong to a political party.
“[We want to] give people a reason to want to belong to a political party and … make sure that they actually feel that they’re being represented by somebody within a political party,” Kenner said. “Otherwise, we’re going to have a lot of people who don’t get to make decisions during the primary election.”
Recently, Texas has made headlines for attempting to redistrict voter maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court set a precedent in their 2018 ruling striking down a partisan gerrymander plan. However, Kenner added, the upcoming PA judicial elections includes three supreme court justices who voted “yes” to remove what had been called “one of the top three starkest partisan gerrymanders in the country and the worst in Pennsylvania’s history.”
READ: Pennsylvania Voters Can’t Afford to Ignore This Year’s State Judicial Elections
“That’s why it’s so important for people to vote in this judicial election coming this year,” Kenner said. “And, there are so many people who have been disillusioned and maybe they haven’t voted since 2008 and have given up. We’re trying to get them to come back into the fold and take part in the democratic process.”
Democratic state Rep. Jim Prokopiak, who represents Bucks County’s 140th district, spoke at the event and said it is a necessity for more people to vote to avoid a small minority making decisions for the majority of people. Relating the topic to the current budget impasse in Harrisburg, Prokopiak added that elected senators in Bucks and neighboring counties will be the ones deciding whether state funding will be allocated in time.
“I will tell you, in 24 days, schools are going to start opening in Pennsylvania, and there is zero dollars for education spending right now,” Prokopiak said. “When we sit there and we see that 40 to 45 percent of voters are making those decisions and not everyone is actually registered, there is a huge disconnect there.”
Kenner highlighted that the organization has registered two 100-year-old women to vote. When asked why they had never registered, Kenner said, they told her “no one ever asked me.”
“We might see someone outside this Dollar General in the coming weeks and they may see us in our t-shirts and say I’m not interested today, but if they see us out there [continuously] they might just change their mind,” Kenner said. “If we’re in their neighborhood and they see us three and four times and they know we’re for real, they may say, today’s the day I’m going to change my mind and get registered to vote.”
