Something about the trucks parked on Evan Preston’s street seemed odd, with their weird arrangement of bumper stickers and flags. He and his wife, Anusha, live in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C., near the National Guard Armory, and they knew there was going to be some kind of protest that day—January 6, 2021. Thinking back on it now, he realizes it was possible some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol may have walked his block on that infamous day.
That night, Preston made his way to the Capitol, where he could see broken glass and security personnel building a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. The sight became “a daily reminder, long after January 6, of what had happened,” he recalls. “This great public space looked like a war zone.”
For Preston, the experience led to a career move. “To see a self-styled militia park on your block and storm the Capitol was, I think, a watershed moment for many people. It certainly focused my attention on the problem of fundamental challenges to democracy,” he says. “That sense of immediate danger, and the urgency to find people who are willing to step up and push back, made me open to the possibility of doing something different from what I had been doing.”
Preston now pours his considerable energies into Secure Democracy USA, where he is a director of advocacy. He works with people across the political spectrum to ensure that fair elections take place, that election officials are safe, and that all voters have the ability to exercise their rights.
Looking beyond red/blue politics
That doesn’t surprise Caress Reeves ’12, an animator and visual effects professional in the entertainment industry who got to know Preston when they lived in the same residence hall at Pomona and who still keeps in touch. She remembers his genuine concern, even as a college student, about racism and discrimination. “He is really dedicated to overlooking red/blue politics,” she says. He is “pushing initiatives that both Democrats and Republicans could get behind.”
Preston came to Pomona in 2008 to study Civil War history. He found mentors in Professors Samuel Yamashita, Lorn Foster and Helena Wall, who still remembers his senior thesis exploring African American response to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg. That undergraduate research project foreshadowed his career direction. Preston has “a principled commitment to other people. It is evident in the way he dealt with people as a student, in his work as a community organizer, and now as a political organizer,” says Wall. “There’s work to do, and he wants to roll up his sleeves and do it.”
Preston credits the College’s Draper Center and its founding director, Maria Tucker, with helping to launch him and “an entire generation of Pomona students who were interested in social justice and wanted to find mission-driven paths after graduation.” He thought that would lead him to law school, until he met a recruiter on campus for the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), who convinced him to become an organizer with the nonprofit organization.
Finding a common thread
Shortly after graduation, Preston headed to Oregon to help pass a campaign finance reform measure in the state legislature. “That required getting both Democrats and Republicans to support going on the record against Citizens United,” the Supreme Court decision that struck down campaign finance reform, he recalls. He drove to every corner of the state, drinking a lot of “pretty rough gas station coffee” and listening to people with widely varying life experiences. Along the way he found that “there was a common thread of people identifying with the idea that we should not allow big money to dominate elections.” The bipartisan bill passed, though it was largely symbolic.
Moving on to Connecticut, Preston helped to pass a student loan bill of rights that became a model for other states. The law created the position of ombudsman to advocate for student borrowers, and it set up a process whereby students who had been wronged by lenders could find recourse.
Mobilizing to help save lives
Response to the COVID-19 pandemic led to another high point in Preston’s career, when he and his colleagues at PIRG helped healthcare personnel save lives by getting desperately needed equipment into their hands. Medical devices like ventilators were in critically short supply—a situation made worse by industry rules about who could fix them when they broke down. “Lots of medical device manufacturers require that their own personnel come in person to a hospital or other medical facility to repair a device,” he explains. “That’s not because there aren’t skilled technicians in hospitals who can do the work. It’s because often there are software locks that prevent independent repair.”
In normal times, repair only by the manufacturer raises costs. During a health emergency, it can also delay care for patients who desperately need it. The PIRG team gathered the stories of real-life situations to pressure companies to release repair information to hospitals. In just a few weeks, companies complied. “Now, some of the largest companies like GE—it has an entire division dedicated to disseminating the repair tool that people need to maintain things like ventilators. It was really the transformation of an industry.”
A time of peril and opportunity
In his work now at Secure Democracy USA, Preston sees both the peril of the times and the opportunities. “What scares me is that there is a fundamental challenge to the notion of our democracy right now,” he says, noting that if elections do not go in the way some people want, it is now conceivable that they could “resort to other means of resolving our differences.” His job is to educate policymakers and the public about what it will take to safeguard our voting system and to work with people who have concerns to find pragmatic solutions.
The task is not easy, but Preston has never signed up for easy. “To me, success is working hard at something that’s worth doing,” he says. “What I’ve come to appreciate through some frustration is you can’t control all of the outcomes, and you can’t guarantee that the world will be different in the way that you might want it to be. But you can control how you apply yourself, and how you’re going to learn from others.”