Good morning, Resistance!
26 DAYS UNTIL THE ELECTION
We hope you’re weathering the storms of the week well. We’ll get through it knowing that by doing our election work we are making a difference. And we have a lot for you to do to get out the vote with under four weeks before November 3.
Now is the moment -- let's get to it!
Tonight – we’ll get together on Zoom, chat, and watch the Vice Presidential debate. Sign up below.
This week – we’ll make lots of calls to voters in Philadelphia and Get. Out. The. Vote. Sign up below.
This Saturday – we’ll take a walk and leave voting literature at voters’ doors or knock doors and talk to voters (your choice). We’ll be doing literature drops every Saturday until the election, and a couple of Sundays too. Sign up below.
Vice Presidential Debate Watch Party
TONIGHT! – 8:30 pm
Watch the debate on zoom with our fun group and watch Kamala Harris take Mike Pence to school. We’ll open up the zoom at 8:30 and the debate starts at 9:00.
Protect the Election Results with Indivisible
Many of you are worried about what will happen right after Election Day if Trump declares victory and orders the voting to stop while mail-in ballots are still being counted, or if he refuses to leave office, or any number of other scenarios. Sign up with Indivisible’s Protect The Results campaign to get all the information and notifications about what we’ll do if any of these scenarios actually happen.
Sign up here to pledge to Protect The Results if Trump refuses to accept the election results. We’re ready to mobilize ahead of a potential constitutional crisis if Trump refuses to accept the results of the election.
CALL TO ACTION
Keep up the pressure to #SaveSCOTUS! Keep making calls to Toomey’s office. If one office voicemail is full, try another one.
Here are the office phone numbers:
Philadelphia 215-241-1090
D.C. 202-224-4254
Allentown 610-434-1444
Erie 814-453-3010
Harrisburg 717-782-3951
Johnstown 814-266-5970
Pittsburgh 412-803-3501
Scranton/Wilkes-Barre 570-820-4088
Here’s the sample script:
I demand that Senator Toomey REFUSE to consider any Supreme Court Justice until the new president is inaugurated. As Senator Toomey said about appointing a Supreme Court justice in 2016: “With the presidential election fewer than 8 months away, it is wise to give the American people a more direct voice in the selection and confirmation of the next justice.” Do the right thing and let the American people use their voice.
VOTING UPDATE
We need to educate every voter about the mail-in ballot rules and about voting on Election Day.
Ballots – If you don’t receive your ballot by October 6 you can go to one of the satellite election offices and they’ll print one for you right there.
Mail-in Ballot Update:
Check out these information sources and share them with your friends. We need to educate as many voters as possible.
Latest list of polling place as of September 30 are at this link. Billy Penn has mapped them all out.
Here is the list of satellite offices opened so far. The election board is in the process of getting the staffing to open the other ten offices. More soon.
The satellite offices are open –
-- 7 days a week;
-- Through Election Day; and
-- Monday – Thursday 11:30 am to 6:30 pm, and Friday – Sunday 9:30 am to 4:30 pm.
--> Check out this Mail-In Ballot Guide. It’s available in several languages.
--> Check your VBM or ballot status at this link.
Attend a webinar/interview with PA Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar about overseeing the November 3 election. October 19, 10:00 am.
Here's another graphic you can share with your friends.
OPPORTUNITIES TO PROTECT THE VOTE ON ELECTION DAY
1. Be a Poll Observer.
The PA Dems need your help to ensure fair elections and you can be a Poll Observer and help out.
Sign up here for Poll Observer training. Two training dates – Monday October 19, at 6:30 pm or Thursday, October 22, at 6:30 pm.
Training is essential and covers the new PA election laws and procedures.
2. Stop Voter Suppression - Be a Polling Place or Social Media Monitor for the ACLU
The ACLU has two opportunities in its Election Protection program. They are looking for volunteers to:
Monitor polling places (you don’t need to be a lawyer); or
Monitor social media for problems.
Sign up here to volunteer for either role on Election Day through the Common Cause website.
3. Voter Protection Opportunities For Legal Professionals
Are you a legal professional? 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 you with opportunities to also work remotely. Training will be provided.
4. Be a Canvass Observer (to protect mail-in vote counting) for the Biden Campaign as the mail-in ballots are counted. Go to JoeBiden.com/ProtectPolls to or call 833-PA-VOTES.
REACH OUT TO VOTERS NOW
We’ll be on zoom for all of the events. Once you sign up we’ll send you all the information.
PHONE BANKING – Call a Philly voter you already wrote postcards to! Sign up and you might just call someone who received a card you wrote.
I know, you think you don’t like to make phone calls. But the calls are good. You might not talk to a hundred people, but you’ll talk to a few and have good conversations. Voters are generally happy to talk to someone about the election.
EVERY TUESDAY
Phone Bank for Joe Biden 6:00 pm
EVERY WEDNESDAY 6:00 pm
Phone Bank for Joe Boden
EVERY FRIDAY 4:00 pm
Phone Bank for Joe Biden
POSTCARDS –
Join other folks writing postcards If you aren’t already writing postcards with us sign up here first to order your postcards for the event. You only have another week to sign up.
Every Wednesday
Cards & Coffee – 11:00 am
Every Thursday 6:00 pm
Cards & Cocktails
Every Sunday 12:00 Noon
Postcards Over Brunch a/k/a Office Hours
EVERY SATURDAY – LITERATURE DROP FOR JOE BIDEN
This Saturday October 10, 12:30 pm. The starting address will be in your confirmation email.
Remaining Saturdays until Election Day, 12:30 pm – sign up here.
We’ll go door to door just dropping off literature in the door of Philadelphia Democrats to get them out to vote.
We’ll be doing this every weekend until the election. If you want, you can knock doors and talk to voters at a safe distance. We will follow COVID precautions. You must wear a mask.
POSTCARD PROJECT UPDATE
We’re down to the last part of this giant postcard campaign. Yesterday many of you received our notice of some important information. First, the dates for mailing the completed GOTV postcards.
If you are outside the Philadelphia area, the mailing date is October 21. If you are in Philadelphia, the collar counties or South Jersey, your mailing date is October 24.
Next, we notified our friends to whom we’ve been mailing the postcard packets that we can no longer ship to them, as the mailing cutoff is getting close. If you are in the local area and we deliver the packets to you in person, you can still order more postcards from us for the next week. See below.
You have just a few days to sign up to write postcards to Philadelphia voters.
1. If you are in the Philadelphia area you can sign up right now by emailing us at this link. We will deliver them to you right away.
2. When you send the email to us give us your first and last name and mailing address. We’ll give you a packet of 100 postcards and the labels to be used on them and all the instructions.
3. You’ll write the postcards right away BUT HOLD THEM until the mailing date for the Philadelphia area, October 24.
4. Order your stamps NOW at this link or at your local post office.
WE HAVE POSTERS!
Get a memento of huge project and your role in it! Let us know if you want a 12”x18” poster of our gorgeous GOTV postcard. You can see the card here.
We’ll either deliver or ship the poster to you. Just donate $20 for in person delivery or $30 if we need to mail it to you. Donate $20 or $30 here and then email us here and tell us you want a poster.
SPONSOR 1,000 VOTERS!
There’s still time to show your support for this project and help to defray the big costs. To give you an idea of our expenses, we’ve sent out 144,500 GOTV postcards and addresses in just the last two weeks, and we’re still counting! This project has been so much more successful than we ever dreamed possible thanks to our wonderful postcard writers, but it doesn’t come without a big cost and our budget doesn’t keep up.
Just a $35.00 donation will help pay for postcards to 1,000 voters! Many of you have already donated and we thank you so much!
A quick Q & A from your recent questions –
Q. Why are we writing to voters to get out the vote at the last minute? Didn’t they sign up to vote by mail?
A. The people we are writing GOTV postcard to have not signed up to vote by mail as far as we can tell from the state’s records. They are likely to be election day voters.
Q. I wrote GOTV postcards already and the new addresses and the new cards I just got have a different script. Why is this?
A. We have two GOTV scripts because we have targeted two different sets of voters. One group is voters who voted in 2008 or 2012 and not in 2016. The second group, which excludes the voters in the first group, is voters under age 30 or registered since 2012 and have not voted in 2016 or after. Both sets of voters did not sign up to vote by mail. We have different messages to each group.
LET’S RECAP –
We introduced our beautiful GOTV postcard on Tuesday, September 22. Since then, in just over TWO WEEKS, we have sent out over 142,500 postcards with addresses to our volunteers!!! This is incredibly important that is for getting out the vote in this crazy swing state. It’s wildly impressive, so good for all our postcard writers and for our tiny team of volunteers in our postcard leadership group.
Here are the stats up to today:
1,457– The number of you fabulous volunteers writing postcards.
33 – States other than Pennsylvania with volunteers writing our postcards. You can see a lot of them in our recent newsletter here. We just added Alabama, Texas, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Indiana, and Wyoming. Welcome!
349,200 – The VBM + GOTV postcards & addresses we’ve sent to our writers so far.
44,550 – The Voter Registration addresses we sent to our wonderful writers.
50,000 – The number of GOTV addresses we sent as part of our project to a group in Ithaca, NY.
443,750 – That’s our GRAND TOTAL so far!
Our grateful postcard leadership team sends a giant THANK YOU to all our wonderful postcard writers!!