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Hope Springs Ballot Cure Canvass Continues. Can't Stop til Every Vote Gets Counted! [1]
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Date: 2022-11-11
Today is the last day to cure ballots in Georgia. This is the second time in this cycle that Hope Springs from Field PAC has been running down voters with problematic ballots that needed to be cured (the first, obviously, being the last Senate runoff) and we are learning things in the areas where we had canvassed in the 2021 Runoffs. Some of the same voters (and in some places, lots of them) needed their ballot to be cured again. Most likely, their ballots were rejected because of a signature mismatch. Their signatures changed as they got older. So you would think Registrar’s offices would update their signatures, right? You would think.
Volunteers chasing down voters with rejected ballots, though, are reporting in Georgia that they are not confused this time around. Most acknowledge they received some form of communication, although they couldn’t necessarily differentiate between communication from their local Registrar’s office or that from the Democratic orgs (like Hope Springs from Field) who are engaged in extensive outreach. “What do I have to do?” seems to be the most common question. Not resistance (“I know I signed my ballot!” was a frequent response in 2021), not necessarily acceptance, but determination. Let’s go do this.
Georgia isn’t the only place. We saw the same kind of raw determination in Pennsylvania, as well. It didn’t hurt that the news media covered the court rulings that led to their ballots being rejected. The window for curing your ballot in Pennsylvania was a short one, and ended on Election Day. But, again, we saw other Democratic orgs contacting our voters to let them know that they needed to fix their mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, organizers didn’t report so much determination as anger. More than once organizers heard comments about judges and how they were the ones who needed to “be fixed.”
448 volunteers drove a circuit and knocked on doors in the past week, trying to locate effected voters and take them to the Elections office, if needed. One volunteer in Nevada had a voter’s wife asked her, after repeated attempts to locate the voter, to tell her when she would be coming back and “I’ll make sure he’s here.” They did, he was, and the volunteer drove him (both, actually) to the office. Nagging works.
But we also had volunteers who were asked other questions from people who opened their doors. Can i still vote if i haven’t returned my ballot? Volunteers in Georgia and Florida even got thanked for fixing a local infrastructure problem because we walked with Constituent Service Request forms when we were knocking on doors this Spring and Summer and the issue got resolved (perhaps through no help from us, we didn’t track CSRs and couldn’t have known if we had anything to do with it). But this kind of deep organizing pays dividends. Democrats are Doing Something!
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 51 counties in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania (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.
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. Volunteers were covering areas where we had knocked on doors before. 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 2,438 voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania at their door. Hope Springs from Field also made 32,157 Robocalls and sent 10,091 texts to these voters. We took 611 voters to their Elections Administrator’s office to correct their issue and delivered the necessary paperwork to the same for 218 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 have no reason to think they are wrong.
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!
The money raised for this is being used for Literature, Robocalls and Gas Cards for volunteers. 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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