Never Give Up, Never Surrender

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?)

VoteRiders--- yes, the name is a shout-out to the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement--- is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to helping people get the documentation they need in order to register to vote and to register to vote. They’re focusing on states with the strictest voter ID laws (their target states are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin) but they are available to help in all 50 states as needed. (FYI to the mods, we don't seem to have a tag for Arizona yet but I've tagged all the other states on which they're focusing.)

This sounds deceptively simple, but it can be complicated, not least because it’s easy, especially in the states with the strictest voter ID laws, to get caught in a “do-loop”--- you need, for example, a birth certificate to get a valid state ID, but you can’t get the birth certificate without proof of your identity. Basically, VoteRiders volunteers help people break through the do-loop to get whatever proofs of identity they need. Also, thanks to their donors, they are able to pay for some of the fees associated with getting ID and other documentation.

One of the “knock-on” benefits of VoteRiders' work is that even though their primary mission is to help people get registered to vote, this kind of documentation is also necessary for a lot of other aspects of people’s lives, like obtaining employment and housing; the organization often works with shelters and transition services for the formerly incarcerated. I am not sure how closely they work with domestic-violence organizations in general, but the first thing that popped into my mind was all the advice given to people living in unstable or dangerous households (whether due to intimate partner or other family abuse or anything else) to keep copies of all your personal paperwork, such as ID, where the people who are making you unsafe can’t get at them. (On that note, the website VoteRiders volunteers often use to help people obtain birth certificates is VitalChek, which you can use directly if you’re in need--- VoteRiders does a lot of this for people who don’t necessarily have reliable access to the internet or similar issues, but if you’re here reading this, that’s probably less of an issue for you or people you know who might need access to documentation.) (Something else I have learned through VoteRiders is that if your mind works that way at all, it's a very good idea to memorize any of your "stable" ID numbers, like your Social Security number and state driver's license/ID number, because sometimes just having the number even if you don't have the physical card anymore, can help, and at least some states can look up your "old" ID number even if you've moved out of state and come back, and this can speed up the process of obtaining relevant documents.)

VoteRiders does its volunteer training online--- they want you to attend at least two virtual “shadowing” sessions with a volunteer who lets you watch while they help people get documents over the phone. More information about volunteer opportunities is here.

(And that's how I spent my Saturday night. Last post here for tonight, I promise.)

Just what it says on the label--- www.usa.gov/register-to-vote. As the site makes clear, all 50 states are different about this, but this helps you get there from here--- much better than my all-50-states linkspam of previous years! (And we have a federal government in the US that is actually helping people to vote! How excellent is that?) (Also, apologies if I'm sort of spamming the comm lately, but especially pursuant to my earlier post about National Voter Registration Day, this seemed like an important resource.)

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.)

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