When I've been a campaign organizer, I've always been a "rides to the polls" skeptic. Campaigns routinely offer to help supporters with transportation on Election Day. Campaign volunteers love to offer to drive voters who need a ride; perhaps this sounds easier and more satisfying than doing what campaigns want everyone to do: talk with mostly unwilling citizens. But in real life, very few voters avail themselves of the offer. Ride-offering volunteers sit around on standby. Yet conventional campaign wisdom says you must make provision for rides.
Working on the UniteHERE campaign in Reno has given me a lens for rethinking "rides." Nevada offers exceptional opportunities for this rethinking because it uses 14 days of in-person, in-neighborhood early voting before the usual election day on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The voting locations are truly local in malls and grocery stores as well as county buildings. For practical purposes fifteen days are Election Day -- this year nearly 57 percent of all votes in Nevada were cast in the early voting period.
In this context "rides to the polls"takes on a different meaning than under more limited voting schedules. It means immediate voting. During the early vote period canvassers can offer anyone they can convince to vote for their candidate an instant chance to do the deed. This is particularly attractive to infrequent and first-time voters who are hesitant about how to do it, who need to have the process made to feel less daunting. "Rides to the polls" becomes not about overcoming disabilities of body or transport, but more about breaking through unease about interacting with government and dispelling apathy. Reno UniteHERE canvassers competed with each other and themselves at facilitating early voter "rides." This helped build momentum around voting in neighborhoods where voting is not currently a natural seeming part of life.
Obviously the state of Nevada helps make this campaign tactic work by offering easy in-person voting -- and giving out the certificates to "first time" voters which the young man displays above.
But it seems worth thinking through how emphasis on facilitating immediate voting by unlikely voters might help campaigns to increase turnout, especially turnout among low-income working people and communities of color. The National Conference of State Legislatures provides a clear summary of the early voting rules in the thirty-seven jurisdictions that allow for in-person early voting. New Mexico probably is the state most like Nevada in providing neighborhood early voting -- and I observed this as long lines outside grocery stores in Albuquerque in 2004. I don't know whether New Mexico campaigns use "rides" as incentive to immediate voting as we did Reno.
Many jurisdictions allow in-person voting outside of official offices at the discretion of county authorities. How many such locations, open for how long, on which days can be highly contested; see also North Carolina. In general. more and longer are better for turnout among infrequent voters (as the GOP fears).
A hybrid tactic that offers some of the immediacy of early "rides to the polls" are rallies and marches to early voting sites. Sometimes that means marches from churches, so-called "souls to the polls." The Houston affiliate of the Women's March organized an ambition slate of "mini-marches" to local voting places during this past election. I remember organizers of homeless voters putting on such a march in San Francisco one year -- since I try to be elsewhere during elections, I don't know whether that's a repeated, regular event.
It seems worth observing that while universal voting by mail, which is the practice in Washington state, Oregon, and Colorado, undoubtedly increases relative turnout (especially when combined with near universal voter registration), it diffuses the immediacy of the voting experience. Mail balloting provides convenience, but what does it do to the experience of democratic participation? Who uses snail mail for anything anymore? Certainly not young people or those who live in precarious circumstances. I suspect that progressives may come to regret our current enthusiasm for mail voting; it makes voting more like individual consumer choice on Amazon and less like a common civic experience. I could see us in a few years campaigning for increased, staffed, ballot drop off points to restore some immediacy to the experience of voting.
Meanwhile -- I'm now an advocate of "rides to the polls" early and often; I've seen it work in communities that don't have the voting habit. We need those communities participating if democracy (small "d") is to have a chance to make this a better country.
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