Write postcards. You can sign up with any number of great organizations and they will guide you. You can get your friends and have a postcard party. It feels good and it works if you team up with national groups who have been doing it. I wrote tons of postcards for 2020. I just mailed 20 of these to Virginia this morning.
One good organization is VoteForward.org. That's the group I was writing for this week in the photo to help with Virginia's upcoming state election. @deetoo posted about it. Another good group is The Center for Common Ground They also have a postcard writing campaign for Virginia. They explain what you need to do to participate.
Last January I wrote postcards for the Georgia run-offs. Working through one of these organizations, we received names and addresses of voters who had been purged from the registration rolls in communities largely occupied with people of color. One woman in my town who belongs to the League of Women Voters, reached out to local league members to see if they'd write postcards. She ordered thousands of blank postcards (see photo below) from Reclaim Our Vote and then Vote Forward provided the voter names and addresses, a template for what to write and stickers of local phone numbers and addresses for voters to get mail in ballots, deadlines for voting etc.
In the fall of 2020, I wrote postcards to voters in Texas, Alabama, and Georgia who had been purged from the voter registration rolls, telling them how to get back on. We kept writing to help them navigate around GOP county Registration Boards that did not want them to vote.
The progressive voter organizations have it down to a science how best to get voters to pay attention to what you are sending to them. It's important to write the cards in your own hand, and use colored pens. I got a pack of colored thin-point felt tip pens from Staples. Voters will pull your postcard out of their daily mail pile and read it.
It's also fun to focus on them with love and kindness while you write to them.
When I was a tween, I wanted to win something that my favorite Boston Rock n Rock radio station was giving away. It was called a Student Survival Kit and it contained rock concerts tickets and other goodies. You had to submit a postcard to them which they'd pick randomly out of thousands of cards. So I bought an oversized postcard and used bold colored pens and wrote, "Pick Me! Please pick me! I want you to Pick Me! They were going to pick ten postcards from thousands of tweens' postcards, then announce your name on the radio at some random time, and you had to be listening at that moment and call them to be in the final ten. Two middle school friends heard my name and called to tell me, so I was able to immediately dial the radio station and make the top ten. ? I knew it was because of the big bold card I'd sent with colored pens. But my family went away on vacation and I never heard who won, not me, obviously. I don't even think I mentioned it to my parents who were clueless anyway about a 12 year old's most important priorities. But I was pleased with my clever postcard trick that made it pop out of the piles of mail they must have received.
I'm back. :-) It would be fun if anyone who was writing postcards posted their projects here, as well as questions. We've got 12 months to the midterms to see if we can subvert the voter restriction laws.
I don't know who to tag for this. Who are the most likely community members to want to check this out or add some words of support?
@jeanne-mayell I write postcards with my local group. "Your voice? Your Vote!!! Speak Out!!!"
"Your vote matters - be heard" "Make a change for the better, Vote" "Share your candle's Light -Vote!"
It's such a small thing to do..yet to imbue each postcard with Love,Hope and Justice...helps me to hang on to those qualities too. A very difficult thing to do sometimes living where I do.
Posted by @jeanne-mayell:
Voters will pull your postcard out of their daily mail pile and read it.
Amen to that, sister! I can tell you from my own experience that these postcards work.
I get a ton of mail, a lot of it junk, which I usually toss away. That also includes most slick political marketing pieces. But during the last election I received one of those handwritten postcards, and I immediately noticed it. I said to myself, "this looks personal; who is this from?" I set it aside and read it. The card included a short message encouraging me to vote as well as a personal message from the sender. Someone took the time to write it, and I felt the positive energy behind it. It left me with a very good feeling.
I'm not sure why I received the card, especially since I vote in every election. My guess is that the cards were generated by volunteers with the local DNC, and because this last election was so important, they wanted to be sure that every registered voter showed up at the polls.
I'm signing up to be part of the postcard brigade!
@deetoo I love that you could feel the sincerity of the person who wrote it.
If anyone wants to start their own postcard brigade in their town, ask here and we can help you get it going.
A friend of mine coordinated a postcard writing project last December in Bloomington, Indiana for Georgia run-off voters. She got a bunch of her friends to help her write 500 of them. Then instead of just popping them into a local postbox, she drove through Georgia on her way to Florida for a vacay and popped them into a Georgia post office so they even got a local postmark. I loved that.
@journeywithme2@dannyboy@lovendures@bluebelle
@deetoo I love that you could feel the sincerity of the person who wrote it.
I, too, received a hand-written postcard last fall. I was rather touched to think someone had taken the trouble to write it, but also felt kind of bad that they had wasted their effort on me instead of sending to someone else, since I *always* vote. It definitely meant a lot more than a mass-mailed flyer.
Virginia's state elections are coming right up and it's a tight and worrisome race. They need help with phone banks to get progressive voters to the polls. Here are some ways you could become part of the change we are all moving towards: (If you have other ideas, please post, and if you have experiences to share, please post.)
The Sister District Project (which is a grassroots organization that sprouted up after the 2016 election to focus just on state level races ) has phone banks for vulnerable incumbent State House/Senate Members, starting this year with Virginia, where the polls are tightening in the Republicans favor. They will pivot to the 2022 state house races after the Virginia election in November 2021.
You can sign up here for the Sister District Project phone banks.
Swing Left Greater Boston (now known as the Swing Blue Alliance) also has dozens of phone banking opportunities into Virginia to fit anyone's schedule. Have a look here. They will also pivot to the 2022 elections after the Virginia election in November, and are also doing fundraising for candidates up and down the ballot.
Postcard/Letter Writing
Vote Forward is a group that has volunteers write letters to Democratic leaning voters to encourage them to get out and vote. Right now they are focusing on Virginia, but also will pivot soon to the 2022 elections. To participate, you just need to log onto the Vote Forward website and there are instructions for how to download and print letters to specific voters that you then would mail on a date specified by Vote Forward. The letters have a space for you to write a comment as to why you vote, etc. Vote Forward provides suggested messages. You supply the handwritten message, the envelopes with a handwritten address (provided at the bottom of each letter) and the stamps. These are very easy to do.
Donating
Donate! Donations for state level candidates are desperately needed, and largely overlooked by the Democratic donor class. The Republicans have for two decades now targeted state level races with huge amounts of money, with great success. They took over 900 state legislative seats in 2010; gerrymandered those districts, and now we have a majority of state legislatures in R hands. The result is pretty clear - voter suppression laws, anti-abortion laws, anti-public health laws, etc., etc. The Sister District Project has a list of 39 carefully vetted candidates that they are supporting. You can check out their list here.
Me again, tagging @deetoo, @ana, @bluebelle, @lovendures @journeywithme2
I'm going to do some phone banking. You can do it from your computer. I love to send these folks positive energy either via phone or via postcards. It enlivens me and gives me hope. I just know that if I participate then others will too. It's that 100th monkey thing or maybe it's just that my own thoughts and warm feelings emit waves of energy out there to all the other people who might want to hop on the light-train and help save our democracy (and our planet and our animals and trees and the disenfranchised, oh, and future generations).
@jeanne-mayell Thank you, Jeanne! These are wonderful ideas. I’ve written postcards before and it’s quite satisfying to make a personal connection to a voter in another state and let them know how important their vote is. Our democracy depends on turnout, now more than ever.
@bluebelle Re postcards -I have even made little drawings sometimes on the postcards. Original art!
Thank you for posting, sweet friend.
@jeanne-mayell On my postcards, I wrote quotes from John Lewis, like “Get into good trouble” in bright colored markers. On other postcards, i used “Vote like your life depends on it,” or “remember John Lewis.”
@jeanne-mayell On my postcards, I wrote quotes from John Lewis, like “Get into good trouble” in bright colored markers. On other postcards, i used “Vote like your life depends on it,” or “remember John Lewis.”
Oh, I love that idea. Going to do that this time.
Here is the situation the House of Representatives is facing this next election:
Every two years, party control is determined by the outcome of only a few dozen seats. Next year, Republicans need to flip only a handful of seats to wrest power away from Democrats. That's why getting out the vote is more critical than ever.
Thank you for your posts about how we can get involved. Thanks to a post you made last year my spouse and I wrote post cards to voters in Florida before the 2020 election.
I plan to write post cards this year at the very least since it is a very important election indeed.
The resources you post here are very helpful!