Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the owner of the Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, Washington Mystics and Capital City Go-Go, is launching a campaign to encourage people to vote in November’s election.

The teams say they will partner with When We All Vote, a non-partisan voting advocacy group founded in 2018 by Michelle Obama, Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others to run a voter registration drive and promote voting and increase turnout through direct appeals from athletes and in-game announcements. Monumental Sports also says it will offer staff a paid day off on Election Day; give employees time to get trained to serve as election workers in D.C., Maryland and Virginia; and even offer up the Capital One Arena as a possible voting site should the city request it.

The new campaign comes as players on the teams have become more politically active in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In early June, the Wizards and the Mystics released a joint statement expressing the teams’ opposition to “injustice, prejudice, discrimination, police brutality, and racism.” A few weeks later, dozens of players from both teams — led in part by Natasha Cloud and Bradley Beal — took part in a protest outside the Capital One Arena to commemorate the celebration of Juneteenth.

Ian Mahinmi, the Wizards’ 33-year-old center, has said that Floyd’s killing prompted him to become more engaged, and he has recently taken up the cause of urging his fans to vote — even though he himself can’t vote in the U.S., having been born in France.

“Everything is set up for you to have a say so, but a lot of us are not aware of all the voting,” he said during an interview from the NBA’s Orlando bubble with DCist/WAMU. “With everything that’s going on now, I wanted to pinpoint one specific area that I think needs a little bit more voice, and it is the vote. And it is to me also the fact that a lot of us, especially Black leaders, need to be better leaders in our communities.”

The push for voting comes amid what some civil rights groups say is a worrying increase in nationwide voter suppression efforts, along with a decrease in Black voter turnout in 2016 after years of steady increases. In D.C., voter turnout among predominantly Black areas of the city has also dropped in recent years.

And the effort by professional athletes to promote voting isn’t limited to D.C.

Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James has joined forces with a number of other players to launch More Than A Vote, which aims to inspire African Americans to register to vote and cast ballots. One of the group’s initiatives is to promote the use of basketball arenas as polling places where many voters could cast ballots while keeping their distance from each other. So far, the Atlanta Hawks have committed its arena for voting, as have the Detroit Pistons.

While nothing has been set in stone yet, Monumental Sports says it is offering the Capital One Arena as a voting site for the November election. That would gel with plans that election officials have already floated to create “super vote centers” in facilities like the Washington Convention Center or hotel ballrooms that can accommodate large numbers of people.

“Voters are now coming out in massive numbers that [traditional polling] places are just not going to be big enough to accommodate folks in a comfortable way and to make the voting experience positive,” says Alice Miller, director of the D.C. Board of Elections. “So my thought was really like an arena. You can accommodate so many more individuals in a different setting.”

D.C. also plans to mail every voter a ballot and set up drop boxes throughout the city.

Monumental says it will formally launch the campaign on July 26 — 100 days from the November 3 election — and use a number of key dates (like Aug. 6, the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and Aug. 18, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment) on which athletes and employees will promote voting.