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Protecting Democratic Voters: Election Protection Isn't a Last Minute Item Anymore [1]
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Date: 2022-08-02
Once again, the Big Lie has been proven to be a fraud. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still threaten Democracy. Specifically, the Big Lie hovers as a huge sledgehammer over minority voters in the next two election cycles. We have to keep raising the alarm, and keep preparing with an eye on how to mitigate the potential damage to Democratic voters.
The day before the Arizona GOP primary for U.S. Senate, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (and, just coincidentally, Republican Senate candidate):
said Monday his investigators found just one dead voter after thoroughly reviewing findings from a partisan review of the 2020 election that alleged 282 ballots were cast in the name of someone who had died.
The dead voter's ballot was never counted. And “None of the three criminal cases the attorney general has filed over dead voters was connected to the Cyber Ninjas investigation, he said.” Out of the other 281 allegations from the fake CyberNinja “audit,” “The others were alive and were determined to be current voters.” Continuing their propensity for outrageous claims over hard evidence, “the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased, and others included dates of death after the election.”
All this foreshadows that is yet to come. And there’s a reason why it’s safe to predict that things will get worse: on the Trumpist side, the Big Lie and the Big Grift are essentially the same thing. It may annoy Democratic voters, inconvenience us, but there’s money to be made! Big Money! Hard to see how the Election Deniers will stop until they are all in jail.
Which means that we have to plan to protect our voters. Prepare for these well-warn tactics. Mitigating them, making it easier for our voters to Cast a Ballot that Counts. Which is precisely one of the main missions of Hope Springs from Field PAC.
There is nothing new here. Their tactics are more than a decade old:
True the Vote’s plan is to scrutinize the validity of voter registration rolls and voters who appear at the polls. Among those in their cross hairs: noncitizens who are registered to vote, those without proper identification, others who may be registered twice, and dead people. In Ohio and Indiana, True the Vote recently filed lawsuits to force officials to clean up voter rolls.
Let’s tackle these tactics one at a time. All voters are required to be U.S. citizens and no one (at least on our side) encourages non-citizens to register to vote. There are a handful of accidental registrations that we know of, but those people never intended to violate the law. Someone encouraged them to register and didn’t explain the citizenship requirement. This is always explained in the fine print (often at the top of the page), but who reads the fine print? Democrats are not intentionally registering non-citizens to vote.
TTV’s second emphasis is denying the vote without “proper identification.” There’s a reason why the Tea Party-inspired TTV wants to force anyone who votes to have a photo ID. Photo ID laws decrease turnout from (mostly) non-Republican segments of the electorate. This is all about shaping the electorate.
We’ve known this was an issue (in specific states) from the start. And we incorporated the means to mitigate this GOP tactic into our canvasses in those states from the beginning. Starting on June 12th, 2021, when Hope Springs from Field began canvassing in the Black Belt of Georgia (repeating our steps in the Georgia Senate Runoff), we had a special emphasis on helping voters without the newly required photo IDs to obtain them. When investigating the kinds of IDs that a voter could use, our intrepid organizers from Albany State noticed this, “An ID card can be issued at any county registrar’s office.” For voters without a photo ID, this seemed like an obvious place to go get one. Driver Services offices were notoriously crowded, everyone knows stories of rude or even offensive employees, and no one thought it a good idea to put voters who didn’t already have that identification through that. In fact, these kids believed that the biggest reason people in the African-American community wouldn’t have the proper ID was the embarrassment factor. Long lines only made the potential of embarrassment worse. Paperwork is also an issue, we’ve learned as we have started finding voters who need to obtain ID.
The offer of a free photo ID that would qualify voters to vote (in person or to request an absentee ballot) is used prominently to defend this new legislation in court. It's not an issue, Republicans say, because anyone can get the required ID at their local county registrar's office. So we started organizing Voter ID Days in the southern and southwestern Georgia counties with either Majority Minority electorates or historical examples of Voter Suppression. We have worked with the county Registrar’s Offices to plan these Days so that they were expected to be low-impact on the Registrar’s Offices by the offices themselves.
We have (and continue to) organized special days in which we gathered those without the needed Voter ID cards to obtain them from their local Registrar’s office in 19 counties in southern Georgia. We have conducted 42 Voter ID days so far and helped 8,948 voters get photo ID cards so they can vote. Previously, 830 voters were turned away because the local Registrar’s office ran out of card stock, but it appears that they have now received their official Photo ID cards. Another 1,934 voters were denied Voter ID cards because they did not provide all the needed documents in order to qualify. Some of these, though, did return and receive their Georgia Voter ID card. This effort continues through September. But those who participated in these Voter ID Days have been a combination of voters we found at the door who needed photo IDs and members of our partner African-American congregations and their Elections Committees (for those who had them).
Hope Springs from Field PAC is knocking on doors in a grassroots-led effort to increase awareness of the fact that Democrats care about our voters and are working to protect their rights. We are thinking how to mitigate Voter Suppression efforts, get around them and make sure we have "super compliance," helping our voters meet the requirements (like organizing Voter ID Days) and get out and vote. We are taking those efforts to the doors of the communities most effected (the intended targets or victims) of these new voter suppression laws.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022electionprotection
Hope Springs from Field PAC was started by former Obama Field Organizers because field was the cornerstone of our success. The approach we adopted was focused on listening, on connecting voters and their story to the candidate. Repeated face to face interactions are critical. And we are among those who believe that Democrats didn’t do as well in the 2020 Congressional races as expected because we didn’t knock on doors. We are returning to the old school basics: repeated contacts, repeated efforts to remind them of protocols, meeting them were they are. Mentoring those who need it (like first time and newly registered voters).
Tracking down voters who are “registered twice” (like former Trump White House COS Mark Meadows and his wife) and challenging those voters’ ballots (in the attempt to prevent them from casting a legal vote) is a specialty of True the Vote. Of course, TTV wouldn’t have challenged Meadows or any other Republican voter. Their quest for voter integrity is aimed squarely at Democrats and voters in Democratic areas. But TTV claims to be data-driven in their efforts to challenge Democrats and other non-Republicans who are registered twice:
True the Vote is now using proprietary software to accelerate the process of challenging voter registrations. It says its databases will ultimately contain all voter rolls in the country. Using computers, volunteers can check those rolls against driver’s license records, property records and other databases, turning the process into an assembly line production.
We will get into the “other databases” TTV likes to use later, but here’s the thing: most voters don’t realize they are “registered twice” (ie, most often, still registered at their old address, generally in a different jurisdiction). For example, a voter in a predominantly Democratic precinct in the 2021 general election in Fairfax, Virginia, was challenged by a Republican poll observer because he was registered twice. He had just moved in the past year. He had formerly lived in the city of Fairfax but now lived in the county of Fairfax, but an area that was still called Fairfax (and not a reference to the county).
The poll worker who was trying to check in the voter was confused and didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, Democrats also had a poll watcher on the premises, as well, and noted it didn’t matter because the voter could cast a provisional ballot. He didn’t need to be turned away, which the GOP poll watcher expected to happen. The GOP poll watcher shared his papers with the poll worker and Democratic poll watcher, and one of them had the TTV letterhead. The point was to cause chaos and confusion.
But this isn’t just a threat in Virginia or Georgia, it is a threat in almost every Swing State polling place in a Minority Majority or heavily Democratic polling place. And the fact is that “disruptive” poll watchers will use just about any excuse to dissuade voters from being able to cast a vote in the precincts they are watching. For example,
On Election Day, poll watchers appeared to have slowed voting to a crawl at Lawrence University in Appleton (WI), where some students were attempting to register and vote on the same day. Charlene Peterson, the city clerk in Appleton, said three election observers, including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that she gave them two warnings.
We are ready. Up until Labor Day, Hope Springs from Field PAC will continue to build out both the organizational capacity and the underlying database for cutting this GOP effort off at their knees. All our canvassers ask not only is the person they are talking to registered to vote, but registered to vote at their current address. We have started to curate training videos for poll watchers because some of these states require that poll watchers sit through trainings before they can obtain the needed credentials.
But because we continue to build out a database of historical acts of voter suppression and intimidation through the collection of Incident Reports, we have something that MAGA and True the Vote reactionaries don’t: prior communication with the courts, the Justice Department and local prosecutors as well as the documentation they’d need to act. Prior election incident reports will be used to point out concerns to local District and US Attorneys offices before election day. It makes law enforcement aware of past practices, and reminds them of their duties to protect all voters in all precincts. It marries local, state and national efforts to protect the vote.
We are establishing Election Protection Teams who will know that we will call in local law enforcement, the feds or take incidents and disruptions to court, if necessary. Election Protection Teams will recruit, train and staff polling locations with Poll Watchers (inside), Poll Monitors (outside) and Ballot Curing Teams to help voters fix ballot issues before time runs out.
Poll Monitor table outside polling precinct in Georgia primary
We start now, organizing among our most vulnerable voters, because it gives us the ability to correct issues (like voter registrations at old addresses), keeps voters engaged in the upcoming elections and build a trust network that will allow friends and fellow congregants to make sure that people vote and that their votes count. This is critical for many reasons, but the fact that this is a midterm election *and* the first election after electoral districts have been re-mapped makes it doubly so. Changes in polling locations may double the importance again. Voters want to feel comfortable about casting their votes.
One last point in this rather long diary: Democratic campaigns can no longer functionally end on election day, but must anticipate continuation at least until the period for ballot curing is over. Activists must start to take that into account, as well, just as we did in the Georgia Senate Runoffs. The election isn’t over until (Democratic) ballots are cured! This is critical not just for absentee ballots that are missing something as well as provisional ballots that require extra steps from the voters. One reason why outside Monitor Tables are important is so that voters who vote provisionally can find out what are next steps they need to take. We can beat this crap.
In the Georgia special runoff, we didn’t let up until Friday, the last day to cure ballots. And I reminded my Albany State organizers of this, because they had participated in tracking down voters whose ballots needed to be cured. But they had forgotten (it wasn’t an exciting memory) and it’s drudge work. Both the new and the old voter suppression laws are all about making voters jump through additional hoops, unnecessary hoops, and we just can’t expect them to do that without being reminded, assisted and even harassed until the final steps are complete.
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please donate:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022electionprotection
Thank you for your support! This work depends on you! (Look for Part Two of Protecting Democratic Voters within the week!)
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