You want to be sure that the Orange Menace and his minions are ousted this November. But you don’t know what YOU can do. Sure, you can give money and hope that you can find a way to help the campaigns. And they will reach out to people like you, who are already committed to voting. And they will pick cohorts that they believe are persuadable. But they will miss people.
There is something that YOU can do, and you can start today. It’s based on the old concept of the telephone tree. As Nancy Pelosi said: “Own the ground. Don’t give one grain of sand. Get everybody out.”
Here’s the high level plan:
- Pick 5 people that you know who may or may not vote in November.
- Call them.
- Convince them to vote, and make that a reality for them.
- Convince them to recruit 5 more people and make it a reality for them, too.
Here’s the math:
If 5 people contact 25 people and then….
- 25 people contact 5 people = 125
- 125 people contact 5 people = 625
- 625 people contact 5 people = 3,125 people
- 3125 people contact 5 people = 15.625 and that’s 35% of our 2016 loss in Pennsylvania
Here’s the detailed plan. If you are interested in participating, I’ll send you everything you need:
- Pick your 5 people. And yes, you can pick more. But plan to expand beyond your close friends and family you know will vote. However, they ARE easy pickings, and you might want to start with them! Place all your information on a spreadsheet. I can give you a spreadsheet that you can use to track your people. And this will be helpful in September.
- Make voting a reality for them:
- Double check that they are registered to vote, and didn’t end up purged for some reason. I’ll provide you the link.
- Check whether they signed up for a November ballot when they ordered their June primary ballot, and if they didn’t help them apply. Again, I’ll provide you the link.
- Check on whether they received their ballot in September, and oversee its return. This may mean driving over to their house and bringing them a stamp. (I only wish I were joking.) People in May complained that they didn’t have stamps and couldn’t afford them. If you need stamps, I will provide them for you.
The goal here is to bank as many ballots as possible before the end of October. Yes, there will be people who want to vote in person, and they will be covered by other programs. This worked really well for us in the primary, although the return rate for Democrats who requested mail-in ballots was 86.84% — meaning that there were likely votes left on the table. Certainly some of those people ended up voting provisionally at the polls, but if we all work together, we can get that number closer to 100%.
If you are interested in participating, drop me an email at chair at indivisiblechesco dot org. In return, you’ll get a detailed instruction sheet, links to all the sites you need, a spreadsheet to fill in, scripts to use with people you contact, and follow up emails from me to keep you energized! If 10 or more people wanted training, I would be happy to schedule Zoom sessions to review scripts, answer questions, and give people the confidence needed to know that YOU CAN DO THIS — IT’S EASY!!!
Remember, when people canvass or phone bank, they are often calling strangers, and getting information from them. Sometimes, people request a ride to the polls, and that way, you know the person voted. With this program, we are being proactive, we are tracking that people applied for, filled out, and returned their ballots, and we can circumvent any problems ahead of time. I hope you’ll join me. There’s a pandemic on, and the only way we’re going to get through it is to decisively win the election.
