Getting Out the Vote,
While Staying In
In this year's critical election, activists face steeper challenges than ever.
By Olivia Canny
Voters aren't the only ones facing new territory in the election landscape of the pandemic. Local progressive organizations must also think outside of the box as traditional door-to-door canvassing comes to a halt. And inevitably, the typical priorities that precede a presidential election — reaching out to swing-state voters, educating low-income and non-English-speaking communities about voting processes, staffing the polls — remain more urgent than ever before.
Jared Lanius works for Swing Left, a group of grassroots volunteers around the country that share a goal of “flipping seats from red to blue,” per their website. Lanius oversees organizing efforts in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and he said that right now, Swing Left’s work is 95 percent phone banking and sending letters — with a serious focus on Wisconsin. Unlike Illinois, a state whose 2020 election results are somewhat easy to predict, Wisconsin is not only a swing state, but it also faces rampant gerrymandering; the boundaries of its voting districts divide voters in such a way that makes it easier for Republican officials to win representation.
Olivia Canny (MANAJ 2021) is the news and podcast editor at F Newsmagazine. She likes taking long walks on Google street view.
Illustration by Cortney Anderson
But crucial election education campaigns are happening in Chicago, too. Rose Colacino leads Election Security and Voters’ Rights for Indivisible Illinois, and said that she has been directing her efforts to low-income communities of color in Chicagoland, citing Roseland and Austin as examples. “A lot of folks, for good reason, don’t trust the voting system,” she said.
Rejection rates are high among mail-in voters from these under-served communities. “A lot of people of color get their signatures rejected,” added Colacino. She’s been using the phone banking campaigns to help instruct voters on where to sign their ballots and how to seal their envelopes. “I’m not telling them that they’re wrong,” she said, “We’re just trying to — via these phone banks — educate voters so if they do vote by mail, they do it right, and then their vote is counted.”
Colacino has direct experience with how this kind of outreach touches under-served voters. During the 2018 midterm elections, she did door-to-door canvassing with a Wisconsin group called Black Leaders Organizing Communities (BLOC). She said that when she canvassed door-to-door in Milwaukee, the people she spoke to made remarks like, “thank you for coming here” and “nobody comes here" — she suggested that the door-to-door model is extremely effective.
But even with phone-banking, Colacino is seeing concrete results: “People are terrified of phone banking,” she said. “But I think it’s a bridge.” Back when Indivisible held in-person events with volunteers, Colacino noted that they would often gather in Andersonville, but she also pointed to the challenge of getting these volunteers to leave their own neighborhoods. “If there’s a voter registration drive, nobody wants to go to the south side.”
This divide between communities and their access to election resources also comes into play when considering what Nov. 3 will hold. “A lot of the people in these communities don’t have WiFi,” said Colacino. “They can’t [get online] unless they go to libraries.” She points to the elderly and non-English speakers as some of the groups that don’t have easy access to vote-by-mail instructions and will likely vote in-person on election day, so the goal is to keep lines at polling locations as short as possible.
But of course, the polls themselves face impending strain on their resources. Even under normal circumstances, the task of election judges and poll workers isn’t easy; Colacino was an election judge during the 2018 midterms and said that the sheer volume of voters was so extreme that she and those working beside her struggled to sanitize equipment in time and hand out enough clean pens. On securing Personal Protective Equipment for the upcoming election, Colacino noted, “I think the Wisconsin election officials did a fine job at trying to secure PPE, but you're competing — God forbid — with the schools, with the hospitals. Are we going to have enough?”
Beyond PPE, polling authorities are also questioning if they’re going to have enough people to run the operation; most poll workers and election judges are typically over the age of 60, and with COVID-19’s increased threat to the health of elderly individuals, a large portion of these workers are opting out for the November election. As a result, the participation of young people is crucial.
Gretchen Coleman, a college student who founded a youth vote initiative called Ballot Z, worked her first election when she was 16 years old (not all states allow this, but Illinois does). Though she took a hiatus when she left for her out-of-state school, Coleman said she jumped at the opportunity to serve as an election judge in the primary election after being sent home at the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.
“I saw on social media that there was a huge shortage of election judges, so I signed up to serve just two days before the election,” Coleman said. She added that her precinct, like many others, was understaffed, and she ended up scanning ballots. “This job is supposed to be done by the polling place technician, who receives extra training. We didn't have a technician and I didn't have any training for this election cycle, but I was still able to do the job reasonably well.”
It’s worth noting that election judge roles and other poll working positions are paid for each day’s labor, and polling authorities are taking things more seriously this time around; DuPage county is even doubling its rate for election judges for the upcoming election.
Even though election judges and poll workers must be eligible voters (with the exception of the occasional allowance of high school judges), opportunities to help with efforts to get out the vote exist for non-US citizens, too. “You don't have to be a US citizen to volunteer in this work,” Lanius said, referring to his own campaigns at Swing Left. “One of my colleagues is undocumented so it's definitely allowed and encouraged if those folks choose to participate.”
For paid Chicago election work visit chicagoelections.gov. To learn more about poll working opportunities in other states, visit powerthepolls.org. And for opportunities to help get out the vote, visit swingleft.org and/or indivisible.org/groups.
