Happy Wednesday Activists!
48 DAYS UNTIL THE ELECTION
(I know we said 50, but that was just to get your attention.)
We hope you’re having a good week so far. So, have you decided? Not who you’ll vote for, but how and when? Will it be by mail? In person? Early? It’s actually still a little too soon for that decision as a few options still need to be determined. So instead, decide now what you’ll be doing – besides voting – to save democracy between now and November 3. Good thing we’re here to help!
If you are not writing postcards, and even if you are, we have a lot of other actions for driving turnout and boosting Joe Biden’s chances of winning Pennsylvania. And we’ll be adding more as we get closer to the election.
For one, we’ll be hanging Biden literature on doors in select parts of the city. More on that as we get closer to the election. We’re adding more phone banks, especially to the voters we wrote our postcards to (see below), and text banks. And of course we’ll be writing postcards for several more weeks.
And one more thing. You will get charged up for the final push at Indivisible's Get Out The Vote Bootcamp on October 3. You can sign up here to go. Come for part of the time or the whole thing. We've gone to these in the past and they are really well done and valuable.
IN VOTING NEWS
A few things have come out about the election that you might not have seen –
1. PA Mail-In Ballots Can't be Discarded Over Signature Matching -- You can read about it in this NYT article. "As a result of this case, Pennsylvania voters can cast their vote without fear that their ballot could be rejected solely because an election official — who isn’t trained in handwriting analysis — thinks their signatures don’t match,” said Mark Gaber, the director of trial litigation at the Campaign Legal Center . . . ."
2. The Philly Commissioners have recently published a few materials for the upcoming election.
A Mail-In Ballot Guide. It’s available in several languages.
A partial list of polling places for the November election. There are over 400 locations listed and the list will be updated every week, with the final list to be published 20 days before the election. Billy Penn has kindly mapped them all out. Not sure how helpful this is, but you can judge for yourself.
A video produced with the Committee of Seventy in which Commissioner Al Schmidt discussed the details of voting by mail and how the ballots are counted. As he describes, many issues are still undecided.
3. Joe Biden is doing a Town Hall tomorrow, Sept. 17, at 8:00 pm in Scranton, hosted by CNN
4. And speaking of voting by mail (good news!) . . . a recent Politico article chronicles the advantage Democrats have in Vote By Mail sign-ups. The advantage in PA is with Democratic voters who did not vote in 2016. This is our postcard project’s target group of voters! From the article:
“In Pennsylvania, which Trump won by just 44,000 votes four years ago, Democrats have built a lead of nearly 100,000 ballot requests from voters who didn’t participate in the 2016 election but are preparing to vote by mail this year, according to TargetSmart’s figures.”
And speaking of voting by mail, Part 2, do you need to check your VBM status? Here is the link to check.
ELECTION DAY OPPORTUNITIES
Here are some roles you can sign up for before or on election day. Not all of them are inside as a poll worker. We know many of you are looking for a way to help, so here goes.
1. Early Voting Help – “Vote-Early Monitor” for the PA Dems.
Voters will be able to “vote early” at county elections office by requesting, completing, and submitting a mail-in ballot all at the same time. Some counties are already announcing these satellite election board locations and Philadelphia says they will have them as well. The PA Dems need your help to ensure Pennsylvania’s first round of voting early in person runs as smoothly as possible. You can sign up here for the Friday 9/18 training on being a vote-early monitor!
As a Vote-Early Monitor, you'll be the campaign’s eyes and ears on the ground: observing how the process runs, educating voters, and reporting to the Voter Protection Team in real time.
2. Election Day – Polling Place or Social Media Monitor for the ACLU
The ACLU has two opportunities for you to volunteer on Election Day. Sign up here.
** As part of its Election Protection program, they are looking for volunteers to monitor polling places on Election Day. You do not have to be a lawyer to volunteer. You will be trained, provided PPE, and assigned to a small number of polling places in your desired location. You will report any issues to the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline and assist voters with questions or concerns.
** The ACLU also needs people to monitor social media for problems on Election Day. Sign up here to volunteer for either role on Election Day.
3. Election Day – Voter Protection Opportunities with the Biden Campaign:
Are you a legal professional? You can help the Biden campaign on Election Day as an in-person poll observer, virtual hotline operator, or other voter protection volunteer.
Sign up here. The Biden team will follow up with details as tasks are ready to be assigned. There will be options to work remotely and training will be provided.
IN THE MEANTIME, PICK YOUR VOTER OUTREACH OPTIONS HERE
We’ll be on Zoom for all of the events. Once you sign up we’ll send you all the information.
Announcing! Phone banking to voters we've written postcards to.
This is great news! We have a new phone bank set-up that calls the very voters we have written our postcards to. So sign up and you might just call someone who received a card you wrote!
This gives the voter a second reminder and increases the chances that they’ll vote – by mail or in person. It's super important.
Plus, we still have two Hubdialer phone bank opportunities with the East Coast Indivisibles. If you prefer this system, where a person answers every call, sign up below. These two events are for all East Coast Indivisible groups. One focuses on Pennsylvania and one on Maine. So for all of you who want to send Susan Collins into early retirement, that one is for you too!
EVERY TUESDAY 6-8 pm
Phone banking -- right up until a week before the election, same time, same place
EVERY WEDNESDAY (it's today!) 11:00 am
1. Cards & Coffee
Sign up here. Pick your dates to write postcards when you sign up.
2. Phone Banking with Hubdialer – 6:00 pm
Sign up here, 6:00pm: We’ll call into PA for Biden/Vote by Mail. Vicki Miller will be speaking on this one to explain to out-of-staters why Pennsylvania is so important.
EVERY THURSDAY 6:00 pm - Postcards
Cards & Cocktails
EVERY FRIDAY 3:00 pm - Phone bank
Phone Bank to our postcard voters!
EVERY SUNDAY 12:00 noon - Postcards
Postcards Over Brunch a/k/a Office Hours
Come for a chat, write some cards, ask some questions. Have fun!
MONDAY 9/21
Phone Bank using Hubdialer 6:00 pm
Sign up here: We’re calling voters in Maine for Biden and Senate candidate Sara Gideon, running against Susan Collins. Woo-hoo!
THIS WEEK’S CENSUS PHONE BANK
Click here for the phone bank link for this week. It’s open from 9:00 am to 8:00 pm.
POSTCARD PROJECT UPDATE
SPONSOR 1,000 VOTERS!
We’re moving fast through our latest batch of 100,000 postcards (see below!). We bought them because the first 125,000 weren’t enough! Because of your enthusiasm and hard work, this project has been so much more successful than we ever dreamed possible but it doesn’t come without a big cost and our budget doesn’t keep up.
So many of you are working like crazy writing postcards. If your schedule doesn’t permit you to write cards with us, please consider making a contribution to the cause. Just a $35.00 donation will help us send postcards to 1,000 voters! Click here to donate. Many of you have already donated and we thank you!
The graphic below, created by our wonderful volunteer graphic designer Emily, shows you our progress through the 17th week of this project, ending September 5. Since then we’ve our writers have asked for another 47,225 addresses and postcards! We are in Week 19 now and we’ll have an updated graphic for you next week. See all the stats below.
Here is our progress to date by the numbers:
29,500+ – Weekly average of addresses we’re sending to our postcard writers.
22 – The number of states outside PA where are writers are located.
983 – The number of our fabulous volunteers writing postcards.
189,800 – The VBM postcard addresses our writers have taken on so far.
44,550 – The Voter Registration postcards our wonderful writers mailed out.
50,000 – The number of addresses we sent as part of our project to a group in Ithaca, NY.
284,350 – That’s our GRAND TOTAL so far!
22 -- States other than Pennsylvania with volunteers writing our postcards. You can see them all in last week’s newsletter here. Plus we just added Nebraska! Welcome Nebraska writers!
BEFORE WE GO –
Indivisible has created a list of 50 Actions for the Next 50 Days.
Trump and his enablers, like Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins, count on us being overwhelmed and unmotivated. So, we’re here to remind you of our power to make history, because we’ve actually done it before. We didn’t just win when critical House seats were up for grabs in 2018; we dominated. Through strategic voter outreach, Indivisibles helped flip 41 GOP-held House seats – marking the largest midterms margin of victory in history.
This time, the stakes are even higher and we’re rising to meet them. We’re voting like our democracy depends on it -- because it does -- and helping other voters get ready to do the same.
Be kind. Wash your hands. Wear a mask. Keep a distance.