Happy Tuesday Activists!
63 DAYS UNTIL THE ELECTION
“In times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers.” ~ Chadwick Boseman, as King T’Chala
Wow is that ever the world we’ve been living for the past 3½ years. We’re watching a weak and foolish person building barriers between us and our allies and among the American people. But we all know what to do, and we’re doing it. We’re doing everything we can to get the vote out – calling, texting, and writing to voters every single day.
Now's the time, friends. If you haven't already, find something you'll like and sign up below! You'll be glad you did come November 3.
TODAY IS NATIONAL POLL WORKER RECRUITMENT DAY!
Honest – it’s a thing and today is the day! So if you’re able and you’d like to do it, you can sign to be a poll worker.
If you are in Philadelphia, you can sign up at this link or call 215-685-4811 or 215-686-3460.
If you are in PA outside of Philadelphia, you can sign up through your county election office or at this link.
To learn more, tomorrow our friends at Fairmount Votes is hosting an informational event for anyone who lives in Philadelphia. Sign up to find out about working at the polls.
Tomorrow, September 2 (7:00-8:00 pm) (On zoom)
Fairmount Votes says you should only sign up for this session if you can:
Be available for a 15 + hour day on Tuesday, November 3.
Travel to any part of the city to work the polls.
Commit to working the polls no matter the COVID situation.
Speaking of voting and polling places, we have some hopeful news.
1. Groups in the Philadelphia area are working to sign up younger poll workers and young people are signing up. Read the article here .
2. The Eagles say they will open up the Linc as a polling place if necessary and offices closed on Nov. 3 so employees can vote and help others – see Jeff Lurie’s presser here on Twitter and here on Youtube. Lurie gives an uplifting and meaningful message.
3. In more voting news, this Inquirer article from last week describes the $10 million grant that Philadelphia City Commissioners office will receive from a nonprofit election technology group. The Commissioners voted to accept the grant last Thursday. The funds will reportedly go to opening satellite election offices and drop boxes, plus buying necessary equipment to make mailing out ballots to voters faster and to counting ballots faster.
Delaware County is reportedly receiving $2.2 million grant from the same group and grants are going to other counties as well.
We spoke with the Commissioners office yesterday and they confirmed they are working on setting up the 15 satellite election offices and 15 drop boxes. There is no word yet on where or when they will be opened but the office staff indicated they would be operational by about the end of September.
SAVE THE DATE! OCTOBER 1
We’re setting up a fun and interesting event for Thursday, October 1st at 7 pm. We’ll hear from the author of a fantastic new book about how election ballots have been created through our history. Believe it or not, it’s a fascinating and surprising story. More details to come very soon!
P.S. That’s the night of one our Cards & Coffee parties, so we’ll write cards for the first hour and then have the book event. Or you can just join at 7:00.
CALL TO ACTION
Sen. Casey – Phila office 215-405-9660; D.C. office 202-224-6324; email link
Sen. Toomey – Phila office 215-241-1090; D.C. office 202-224-4254; email link
Yes, we still need to push for this. Congress is not in session this week but we need to let them know we are not forgetting about the pending legislation to help with COVID impacts. Trump is still doing everything he can to destroy the Postal Service and make it impossible for voters to vote by mail during a pandemic -- slowing down Social Security checks and medications for seniors and veterans in the process, plus more. The House has passed two important pieces of legislation to fix this. Now it’s the Senate’s turn. We need to tell our Senators we demand action.
1. Call our Senators and tell them to save the Postal Service by supporting the Delivering for America Act. See the details about the legislation here.
2. Call our Senators and demand they pass the Heroes Act with $25 billion in USPS funding and $3.6 billion in election funding. See the details about the Heroes Act here.
Here are a couple of visuals for you about our postcard project progress. The first shows the status after just the first five weeks of our hard work.
And here's where it stood after 15 weeks of our work. We're covering the White House in a giant blue wave of postcards!
YOUR EVENTS FOR THE COMING WEEK. JOIN US!
We’ll be on Zoom for all of the events. Once you sign up we’ll send you all the information. Here’s what’s on tap for the coming week.
TOMORROW 9/2
1. CARDS & COFFEE – 11:00 a.m – 1:00 pm
Sign up here. Pick your dates when you sign up.
2. TEXT BANK – 3:00 p.m.
We’re texting to Florida Voters for Vote By Mail. We’ll train you at the beginning of the event.
Please note: You must use a computer to text bank on the Indivisible texting platform; a tablet or phone will not work.
Indivisible national also has training on TODAY at 8:30 p.m. You can sign up here.
THURSDAY 9/3
CARDS & COCKTAILS 6:00 p.m.
SUNDAY 9/6
POSTCARDS OVER BRUNCH – 12:00 noon
TUESDAY 9/8 6-8 pm
PHONE BANK for Joe Biden 6:00 p.m.
THIS WEEK’S CENSUS PHONE BANK
Click here for the phone bank link for this week. It’s open from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
SPONSOR 1,000 VOTERS!
We can’t believe it but today we are picking up a new batch of our beautiful postcards. We had to order more cards because the first 125,000 weren’t enough! So, with your generous support, we just bought 100,000 more! Because of your enthusiasm and hard work, this project has been so much more successful than we ever dreamed possible. But there is so much more to be done and we have still outstripped our budget. So very many of you are working like crazy writing postcards. But if your schedule doesn’t permit you to write cards with us, please consider making a contribution to the cause. Just a $30.00 donation will help us send postcards to 1,000 voters!Many of you have already donated and we thank you!
POSTCARD PROJECT UPDATE
Here is our progress to date by the numbers:
Remember, our original goal was 50,000 postcards.
21,500+ – Weekly average number of addresses we’re sending to our postcard writers. That’s up from 5,000 per week only a three weeks ago!
775+ – The number of our volunteers writing postcards.
155,000+– The number of postcard addresses we’ve sent to postcard writers so far.
50,000– The number of postcards being written and sent to our Philly addresses by a group in Ithaca, NY.
That’s a total of over 205,000 postcards – and counting . . .
19 -- States other than Pennsylvania with volunteers writing our postcards. Thank you!! Here’s the list –
New York
California
Georgia
New Jersey
Illinois
Maryland
Washington
District of Columbia
Vermont
Connecticut
Florida
Tennessee
Maine
Delaware
Ohio
Colorado
Virginia
Michigan
New Hampshire
Read all about how it works here.
Check out these amazing photos from our postcard writers in other states!
The photo on the left is from Rebecca and Jamie in San Francisco. The one on the left shows a "Postcards in the Park" event in New York City over the weekend from our friends at Indivisible Upper West Side. Thank you all - keep the photos coming!
