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Can't Stop Until Every Vote Gets Counted, Which Means Ever Ballot That Needs It Is Cured! Yes We Can [1]
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Date: 2022-11-02
The days before an election, the time when more people want to know more about what we are doing, is also the time when we (those involved in campaigns and elections) are the busiest. If you are anything like me, you are deluged with emails from candidates and campaigns and i certainly envy those digital and fund-raising operations because Hope Springs from Field PAC couldn’t even get off the one fund-raising email to our donors because of the work needed to be done to mobilize *our* voters to vote. Field staffers don’t make the best fund-raisers. And everyone wants to know (iow, keeps asking), “how’s it going.”
Regardless, what we are doing is sticking to the plan. Hope Springs from Field laid out our GOTV field plan here at DKos in the last couple of weeks. Our GOTV plan is an interconnected and related effort to drive and increase voter turnout for the midterms, including making every effort to ensure that our voter’s votes count. There are basically six phases to this Get-Out-the-Vote plan for 2022. Phase One was organizing New Voter Postcards and followup communications with New Voters to the 15,737 new Voters we registered at the doors since June 2021 in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Phase 2 of Hope Springs’ GOTV effort was collating the 1,373 Incident Reports we collected at the doors, combining them with other databases of Election Day Intimidation and Suppression, analyzing the data and combining that with other indicators of possible election interference this year. Phase 3 has been the recruiting of attorneys willing to serve as floating legal eagles on Election Day and familiarizing them with the data we’ve collected from canvassing, prior incidences & reports as well as administrative action taken in the past.
Phase Four has been organizing, training and activating the mentors who we have recruited to interact with the 15,737 new Voters we registered in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Phase Five is Ballot Curing, curing voter signatures for Absentee Voters to make sure their vote counts. And Phase Six was recruiting, training and assigning Poll Watchers as well as setting up Polling Observation Tables in precincts that have historical patterns of problematic behavior, voter intimidation or suppression, or otherwise have been recorded in our Incident Reports.
Curing Signatures is perhaps the least understood aspect of our GOTV plan and we will work through the last and final moment that we can help voters in Senate Swing States to make sure their vote counts. We are focused on the 39 counties in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Ohio (the states/counties we have been knocking in that allow voters to redress issues on their Absentee or Mail Ballot when their local Elections Administrator identifies them). And we have had volunteers out knocking on doors, texting or making phone calls in these states from the moment that ballots started to be flagged. They will continue until the moment they can no longer be rectified.
In 2020, more than 560,000 ballots were rejected because of apparent voter signature mismatches (as perceived by their elections office). States that have a ballot curing process, though, have significantly lower rates of rejected mail ballots. But this doesn’t happen by magic. We have to do everything we can to make sure that their votes are accepted and counted.
Ballots are rejected largely because of a perceived signature mismatch. This heavily affects voters at the margins — minorities, young people, people with disabilities, trans and gender-nonconforming people, women, people for whom English is a second language, and military personnel. Women who change their name upon marriage or divorce, are also often affected (as we discovered in our ballot curing efforts during the Georgia Senate runoff in 2021).
When Hope Springs from Field started canvassing back in June 2021, we always knew that the 2022 Midterms would end with Ballot Curing. Understand this is the reason why we invested in mobile scanners/printers for use with voter registration, absentee (VBM) ballots and ballot curing. Mobile printers allow voters to bring their acceptable identification to the volunteer’s car, scan the ID themselves and take the copy back to to include with their absentee ballot or ballot curing form. They do the scanning and printer so that they know that their "numbers" are secure. We’ve known that we needed to have these assets on the ground, ready to go when the time came.
Georgia Lit, Front
That time is now. In the past week, 263 volunteers have knocked on doors in the same counties we knocked on this Spring, Summer and Fall. For the most part, these volunteers are not our “Super Volunteers” who came out week in and week out (which still amazes me!), because many if not most of those have moved over to the senate and coordinated campaign’s field efforts. We’ve been calling these the LWV vols, but one of our (African American) organizers corrected us (white folks), noting that most of these volunteers are not the white ladies you would generally find at League of Women Voters’ events. Most of these volunteers in Florida, Georgia and even Ohio are African-Americans, mobilized primarily through the Divine Nines and the Black Churches. In Nevada, most of them are union workers and only in Arizona are they primarily Caucasian volunteers drawn from our prior canvass work there (realize that for both Arizona and Nevada, this was our first Summer canvassing in those states (in Ohio, too, but we were already linked up with Divine Nines there), and so we are heavily dependent upon our own volunteer base in those two states).
Here’s the thing. Elections Administrators notify and wait for voters to follow through. Campaigns engage is something more akin to nagging. Elections Administrators may notify through one-off phones calls or a single letter. But we will use every tactic to make sure that voters are aware that their signatures need to be “cured:” emails, robocalls, live calls, texts and knocking on doors. Repeated efforts to connect, notify and resolve. Repeated contact until the deadlines pass.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First Round of a traditional Five Round Canvass. 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, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ballotcures
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that repeated voter interactions are critical. 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). Reminding, reminding, reminding, and then chasing down those voters whose ballots need to be cured.
While we are focused on these five, critically important, Senate Swing States, there are additional states that have provisions for ballot curing. Every state is different, of course, as you can see from the spreadsheet image above.
Many states allow you to track your ballot with an online portal that shows you when your ballot is received and then processed. Some of them even let you know if your ballot is rejected. They may even give a reason why.
Georgia Lit, Back
This information is also available on VAN. And VAN allows us to not only track those voters who need to have their ballots cured, but also to track how many times we have reached out to those who need to have their ballots cured.
In the 2021 Senate Runoff in Georgia, Hope Springs volunteers cured over 200 ballots. It was in that effort that we learned about the need for mobile printers. But it was through the process of helping (mostly minority) Georgians get free photo Voter IDs that we realized that there were conservative orgs and Republican volunteers determined to challenge as many voters as possible on the most picayune issues, seeking to force voters to document those issues before their votes could be accepted and counted.
In the last week, we contacted 1,135 voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Ohio at their door. Hope Springs from Field also made 718 Robocalls and sent 382 texts to these voters. We took 38 voters to their Elections Administrator’s office to correct their issue and delivered the necessary paperwork to the same for 62 voters. We will continue to reach out to these disenfranchised voters through various means of communication until they have cured their ballot or their deadline for doing so has passed. But we do need your help -- specifically your money! -- if you have the ability to help. Since we are making multiple attempts to contact voters, printing costs and costs for phone communications are difficult to plan for.
The Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights thinks this disproportionately effects People of Color. I would argue that this is so because Republican and conservative groups are challenging voters in predominately Democratic areas, whereas Democrats don’t do the same. We believe U.S. citizens who are registered should have a right to vote.
But, as a result, 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. The election won’t be over until (Democratic) ballots are cured!
If you are able to support our efforts to mobilize these difficult, brand new voters to cast their ballots in November, especially in minority communities, expanding the electorate, or just believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please donate:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ballotcures
Thank you for your support. This work depends on you!
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/2/2133011/-Curing-Ballots
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