Voting together

The east coast branch of the UniteHERE national phonebank took a short turn through North Carolina last week to help on-the-ground organizers turn out voters to this Power to the Polls festival in a Charlotte park and their march to vote. Looks like they had a good time.

It's great to see our work is succeeding.

This effort, like many across the nation, aims to restore some sense of community to the election process though which we make our national and local democratic decisions.

Not long ago, there was only Election Day voting unless you submitted an excuse to vote by absentee ballot. But states in the Pacific Northwest experimented with mail-in voting and discovered this increased turnout (sometimes). Some states added early in-person voting options. The COVID year further encouraged many states to implement various systems of mail, drop box, and other options which reduced crowding and responded to some people's fears of being around others.

So, really, we no longer have Election Day as so much as Election Month. This year almost all states use some version of voting options distributed over time. 

A friend describes what living through the transition felt like:

When we lived in Colorado, we were some of the very early voters in line to cast our votes on Election Day, and at first I really didn't like that we couldn't have that moment duplicated here in Washington State. But now I have grown to prefer it this way, because we can be assured that our votes will definitely be counted and not manipulated in any way.

Early in the transition to early voting options, I was uncomfortable. An election is the most collective experience we participate in as citizens of a huge, wildly diverse, country. As Karl Kurtz wrote way back in 2007:

[Early voting] eliminates the notion of a national civic convocation of the American people on election day...

We've made voting a solitary action for many of us. Is this good? Certainly it is good for campaigners; we push early voting with gusto and profit by it because it reduces the number of people we have to reach on Election Day. (And early voting relieves voters in contested areas of that relentless flood of calls and texts.)

But I'm glad to see more and more groups creating public events like Charlotte's Power to the Polls march to remind people they are in this big thing together.

After all, voting is a chance to join in a celebration of the best aspirations of this country, even in these terrible times!

We even have election parties in San Francisco.