thisfinecrew | Entries tagged with elections

The three registered voters in our household each got a folded postcard from our local Board of Elections in a small Massachusetts city. On the outside, one side has the name and address; on the other side, it has a voter confirmation form. On the *inside*, there's the following:

"Dear Voter:
Our records show that you have not answered the annual street listing (census) as required by law (Massachusettes General Law Ch. 51 S. 4). Therefore, your name will be designated as "inactive" on the voting list.
If you have not moved or if you have moved to a new address in the City of Medford, please return the attached postage-paid postcard and you will be restored immediately to active voter status.
If you have moved to another City/Town or State, complete, sign and return the attached postage-paid postcard and your name will be removed from the voter list in Medford. You must register to vote in your new City/Town. You may use a mail-in form or online at www.registertovotema.com to register in Massachusetts .
If you do not return the attached postcard, your name will be removed from the voting list if you do not vote in at least one of the next two federal elections or take other action that would reinstate you as an active voter. (per M. G. L. Ch. 51 S. 37A)"

N.B. - I returned our city census and we have all voted in the last three elections.

So yeah, voter suppression exists even in this very blue state, and they're probably hoping people will ignore this reminder in a local elections year. Check your mail! And you can find out how to check your voter registration in another state at vote.org.

bibliofile

Today is election day in Wisconsin for state and local offices.

(You may have heard about the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court.)

Polls are open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Bring photo ID to verify your identity.

If you need to register before voting, bring proof of current address too.

One-stop site for voting info is MyVote Wisconsin: https://myvote.wi.gov/en-us/

tanaqui

Election Day is almost upon us!

This is a post for you to talk about what you've been up to and what you're still planning to do before (and on) Tuesday.

any last minute GOTV efforts
your experiences of voting yourself (mail-in, in-person early voting, in-person on the day)
what's going on locally (polls, downballot races, etc)
what you'll be doing on Election Day itself (are you a poll worker? In which case, thank you!)
anything else you want to chat and cheerlead about!

(Apologies for the short post: I had a busy weekend which was not helped by a major travel SNAFU that meant I didn't get home from the fun thing I was doing yesterday until this morning, after not enough sleep.)

hermionesviolin

For anyone who missed signups from Postcards to Swing States: A Progressive Turnout Project Initiative, I just got an email from them:

Sign-ups for postcards are back open as we make a final push for 40 million postcards to rally Democrats to vote! We will likely send you postcards for a competitive US House district or Florida, though we have some additional voter lists for swing states and Ohio. If you aren't willing to write to voters for whatever list we send you, please do not sign up.

The mailing dates for these final orders are between Oct 24 and Oct 29. We'll ship the postcards as quickly as possible.

There's also an option to opt-in to write postcards to persuadable seniors about the importance of voting for Democrats in order to protect social security from Republican proposals to cut this vital program.

Please note: You will be responsible for providing Postcard Stamps, which are currently $0.56. We'll mail you free postcards, along with voter lists and instructions with proven message options.

I suspect it is still true that you can add a note with the number of postcards you want (in increments of 25) if you don't want to do 200 (the minimum number on the drop-down menu).

sathari

Geeks and Nerds for Harris, which is holding a livestream tomorrow, hosted by Lynda Carter.

sathari

It's National Voter Registration Day! To honor the day, here are a grab-bag of links to sites where you can check your voter registration and/or register to vote:

Change.TurboVote.org

Common Cause

Healthcare Voter

National Voter Registration Day

I Will Vote

Human Rights Campaign

And, yes, I know these all pretty much do the same thing, but this way if one site is down, or if you want to give traffic to a particular organization, or if you're working a voter registration drive with a specific theme or group attached, you can pick the one or ones that work best for your needs. (Mods, do we need a "2024 election" tag?)

semielliptical

Writing postcards and letters is one way to help get out the vote for US elections.

hermionesviolin posted here last month about Postcards to Swing States, which is a great campaign, but they have completed their sign-ups for this year.

So if you are looking for other opportunities to write to US voters, or if you signed up for Postcards to Swing States and want to write while waiting for those postcards to arrive, consider the organizations below. I have written for all of them over the last several years; the variety of messages and styles has helped me maintain my motivation to reach out to voters.

I listed supplies needed in case that is helpful; check out the websites for full instructions.

Center for Common Ground / Reclaim Our Vote
“Fighting for Voting Rights and Mobilizing Voters of Color.”
Uses messages that are respectful and culturally sensitive, and includes personalized, local voting information
Supplies needed:

Order and use only their postcards.
Postcard stamps.
Not absolutely necessary, but very helpful: access to a printer for printing labels with local voting information.

Postcards to Voters
“Friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.” Write for a variety of campaigns, both large and small. You’re usually instructed to mail the postcards immediately so you can feel accomplished right away.
Supplies needed:

Postcards: provide your own, either from their Etsy store or any other source with suitable designs. You can even use pre-stamped postcards from the USPS; very cost-effective.
Postcard stamps.

Vote Forward
Add a personal, heartfelt message to get-out-the vote letters targeting voters in swing states.
Supplies needed:

Access to a printer for printing letters.
Envelopes and stamps.

If you have other organizations or campaigns to recommend, please comment!

hermionesviolin

I recently signed up for the email list for Postcards to Swing States: A Progressive Turnout Project Initiative, and got an email from them just now: "We have resumed sign-ups for our postcard program to rally Democrats to vote in 56 competitive US House districts!"

Sign up below to write postcards to rally Democrats in competitive House districts to vote on Nov 5. We'll mail you free postcards, voter lists and instructions with three message options (expect to receive them within 2-4 weeks).

You'll provide the postcard stamps and mail the postcards on October 24.

Competitive House districts in Presidential and Senate battleground states are already covered by our statewide postcard program. Sign-ups for that program will resume no later than August 5.

It looks like the smallest number of postcards you can order is 200, so you may want to recruit some friends to help -- though even if it takes 4 weeks for you to get your postcards, that's still about 2 months to write them (you mail them soon before the election so they're fresh to encourage voting).

Their email notes:

Finally, please pick from one of the proven messages on the instructions that we send with your postcards. They will be far more effective at helping Kamala Harris and other Democrats than a message that mentions her or threats to democracy. For this program with cards that will arrive close to the election in November, we're following the most effective strategy to rally Democrats to vote. More than 15 years of research from leading progressive data-driven organizations proves that messages focused on voting are far more effective at increasing Democratic turnout than those that are partisan. See our research and more on this and other topics at our FAQ page or watch our webinar from June that explains our data-driven approach.

Thanks for all your activism!
— Postcards to Swing States Team

Progressive Turnout Project is the largest voter contact organization in the country. Our mission: Rally Democrats to vote. We design, test, and execute specialized voter turnout programs targeting inconsistent Democratic voters in the most competitive elections up and down the ballot.

Edit: I posted in a local Discord to see if other people wanted some of the postcards I'm ordering and someone said:

i would also like to do some postcards. also though someone i follow on mastodon shared a link to this postcard campaign with the note:
If you want to write postcards to voters but find the minimum of 200 to be undoable, you can request a smaller number! Just select 200 when you submit your order and then let them know the actual amount you want (in multiples of 25 such as 100) in the "drop us a note" field.

Edit2: And someone else said, "I think i was doing ~50 a week in 2020? It'd take somewhere between 30-60 mins. I did them on lunch breaks. If that's a useful metric."

sathari

I thought this might be relevant to some of our interests in the wake of today's news: link to donate to VP Harris' presidential campaign.

ETA thanks to folks in comments:

minoanmiss also recommends contacting the DNC to encourage them to make her the official nominee, and

philomytha let us know that US citizens who are overseas can contribute through the linked site if they give their passport number. Thanks so much!

Further ETA from comments: quoting our wonderful mod

tanaqui: "If you have time rather than money to donate, take a look at https://events.democrats.org/

If you click on the filter button near the top of the page, you can search for events that are local, GOTV, canvassing/phonebanking or ADA accessible."

And

minoanmiss would like to credit

petra for the idea of contacting the DNC. (This is probably my last update to this post, so that newer ideas can go in new posts and more people can see them.)

sathari

TurboVote is something of a one-stop resource for election information: on the page I've linked ,you can sign up for election reminders and also get help with registering to vote. (I've been meaning to make a post about this for a while but I put it off until I'd had a chance to see for myself if the reminders worked--- and they do; I got one for the primary in my state.)

tanaqui

Has everyone enjoyed watching the red wave not arrive?

The Senate looks to have remained under Democrat control (assuming no Republican troublemaking over the races that have been called) but there's still a run-off in Georgia. Winning that would mean Senate business would suffer less from being held hostage by the usual suspects. So let's keep moving forwards with that!

Warnock's fundraiser is at:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/socialrunoff22

You can find links for the posts that were made for the 2020 run off at the comm's Georgia tag:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/tag/state:+georgia
(I haven't checked the links in the posts to see which still apply.)

The House looks like it will end up in Republican control — just. Which somewhat limits their ability to introduce and progress bad legislation. (Although I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty about Hunter Biden's laptop and other similar nonsense in special investigation committees.)

At this point, it looks like the main need for House races is any remaining ballot-curing work, so please leave links for that if you have them.

And, of course, please let us know about any other actions we can take.

Finally, let's celebrate those governor and state legislature wins, the rejection of abortion restrictions at state level and all the other good stuff that happened!

tanaqui

In the spirit of "hope for the best but plan for the worst", Indivisible and Stand Up America are building a coalition of voters ready to mobilize if Donald Trump refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election.

We will demand that every vote be counted, even if it takes days or weeks to get an accurate count from critical states, especially given the expansion of mail-in and absentee voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will organize to ensure that the loser concedes, and that Congress, the Electoral College, and state officials honor the accurate, final vote count.

https://protecttheresults.com/

sathari

In case anyone missed it, here is... well, just what it says in the subject line ;) : 538's state by state guide on how to cast your ballot in the upcoming US election. (Edited for more precise wording.)

sathari

Some of you may remember this post that I did for the 2018 US midterm elections. This is the 2020 version. I note that with COVID-19, you’ll probably want to check not just by state but by your local-level election authority for details on your own voting; your local Democratic party may be a good resource as well.

I would estimate that at least half the links from last election had changed when I looked them up, so doing this again for this election was definitely not redundant.

Some notes: compared to last election, many of the websites seem a lot more thorough and well-organized; as a result, and in order to speed up my getting this posted, I didn’t spend a lot of time hunting down specific links to referenda and sample ballots--- not least because with COVID-19, enough of us are probably voting by mail that we’ll have the ballots themselves in hand with time to do our research on any “surprise” items in them.

Last but not least, I’m sure just about anyone on this comm probably knows their own state’s online election resources by heart, but if you’ve got friends and family elsewhere who need help, or (especially) if you’re phonebanking or textbanking to people out of state, having a handy guide to their state’s election material might help. (In this the age of cellphones, it’s totally not unheard of to call someone with an area code assigned to one state and find that they’re in another.)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: productive

gingicat

Don't forget that tomorrow is the primary election in Massachusetts!

The Democratic side features a hotly-contested Senate seat; middle-aged progressive Ed Markey versus young moderate Joe Kennedy. Here in Medford there's a contest for State Rep between stodgy but kind looooong-time incumbent Paul Donato and progressive idealist Nichole Mossalam. And some others worth researching.

Any Massachusetts resident old enough can observe a polling place for at least half an hour; I can provide information regarding what to look for.

I was supposed to be working for the City of Medford at Ward 8, Precinct 2 tomorrow, but I woke up with the sort of sore throat that's a cold symptom (Edit: now gone again), so I cannot in good conscience do so. I'll call my precinct clerk in a couple of hours so he can get a substitute via the City Clerk's office. This substitute may be a first-timer, and the clerk is a third-timer, and it's easy to forget to check the manual (the link goes to an only-slightly-out-of-date example). So if you can come observe at the fire station at Zero Medford Street, I'd be particularly grateful.

tanaqui

An initiative from Vote Save America (run by Crooked Media, the people behind the Pod Save America podcast):

You don't live in a battleground state. So how do you help out in the states that will determine who wins in 2020? We finally have an answer: No matter where you live, you can directly support the work of organizers, volunteers, and candidates in the six key battleground states that will be most important to delivering a progressive majority in 2020. Just pick a state below, sign up, and we'll get you everything you need to make a big difference this November.

The states are: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

https://votesaveamerica.com/adopt-a-state/

gingicat

I was working at the polls yesterday. ( Read more... )

Now I'm writing to remind everyone that there is another primary in Massachusetts on September 1, for statewide offices and Congressional seats. The deadline to register or change your party affiliation is August 12. Among other offices, the US Senate seat is contested in the Democratic primary. There are not (yet?) early voting dates. See sec.state.ma.us for more information.

Current Mood: hopeful

redbird

A lot of states are having presidential primaries tomorrow, March 3rd.

If you run into any trouble at the polls, or see people trying to stop someone else from voting, the Voter Rights Action hotline is 866-OUR-VOTE.

sathari

So the bulk of the US primaries are upon us!

My Time to Vote is a great resource across the states--- if you get their app (I couldn't find a link on the website, but if you search for it on your device's app store you can probably find it) it's a quick way to find your local election dates.

Vote411, by the League of Women Voters, is another "one-stop shop" for voter information.

Common Cause is still another resource--- if I recall correctly, in addition to proving information to voters, they also offer opportunities to volunteer as a non-partisan poll monitor.

ETA: Courtesy of

philomytha there's also Vote From Abroad, which is a non-partisan org helping US citizens living/traveling abroad to vote, and Democrats Abroad, which is for Democrats living aboard, including help voting in the Global Primary. (Also, at least one person has commented with state-specific information--- thanks,

redbird !--- so you may want to keep checking comments here.)

Finally, here's the roundup I did back in 2018 of state-by-state official voting websites; I haven't updated it and would not be shocked if some of the links are dated, but it's a place to start: Link(spam): US Voter information.

rydra_wong

https://twitter.com/mviser/status/1063868172330254336

Mike Espy remains the underdog, but Republicans with access to private polling say Hyde-Smith’s lead has narrowed significantly in recent days. Republicans need only to look to Alabama, where Doug Jones pulled out a surprise win last year, to stoke concern

With link to WaPo: In Mississippi, Republican concern rises over a U.S. Senate runoff that should have been a romp

This is who Cindy Hyde-Smith is:

https://twitter.com/LamarWhiteJr/status/1063192983254822912

Cindy Hyde-Smith on voter suppression: "And then they remind me, that there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea." (with video)

See also: TPM: GOP Worries Mississippi Senate Seat May Be In Peril After Senator’s Missteps

And just now: Walmart Rescinds Support Of Sen. Hyde-Smith, Requests Contribution Refund

This is specifically after publicity about their donation, so yeah, this stuff has an effect.

JuddLegum is on the ball with this again.

Oh, the latest:

https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/1064945542705369088

There’s a Facebook photo of Cindy Hyde-Smith posing in a Confederate hat at the home of Jefferson Davis. Her post reads: “Mississippi history at its best!” (photo and link included)

Volunteering options to support Espy include texting to get the word out, which might be a good option for people who are not phone-capable.

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gingicat - voter registration shenanigans
bibliofile - Wisconsin elections today (4/1)
tanaqui - Elections 2024
hermionesviolin - more postcard signups available
sathari - This might be relevant to our interests....
sathari - National (US) Voter Registration Day!
semielliptical - Get out the vote with postcards and letters!
hermionesviolin - Postcards to Swing States: Write Postcards to House Districts!
sathari - Kamala Harris Presidential Campaign Donation Link
sathari - TurboVote
tanaqui - Post-election post/Georgia Run-Off
tanaqui - Action: Organizing to protect the results of the 2020 Election
sathari - 538's guide on how to cast your ballot in the upcoming US election
sathari - Voting and election websites by US state
gingicat - MA polls tomorrow
tanaqui - Action: Adopt A State
gingicat - thank you for voting yesterday!
redbird - "Super Tuesday" primaries
sathari - US Primaries are in full swing
rydra_wong - oh hey well will you look at that

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Never Give Up, Never Surrender

Links and Positive Action for the next Four Years

Entries tagged with elections

voter registration shenanigans

Wisconsin elections today (4/1)

Elections 2024

more postcard signups available

This might be relevant to our interests....

National (US) Voter Registration Day!

Get out the vote with postcards and letters!

Postcards to Swing States: Write Postcards to House Districts!

Kamala Harris Presidential Campaign Donation Link

TurboVote

Post-election post/Georgia Run-Off

Action: Organizing to protect the results of the 2020 Election

538's guide on how to cast your ballot in the upcoming US election

Voting and election websites by US state

MA polls tomorrow

Action: Adopt A State

thank you for voting yesterday!

"Super Tuesday" primaries

US Primaries are in full swing

oh hey well will you look at that

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