As far as I know, Hope Springs from Field [website] is the only entity focused on Swing States taking a wholistic approach to GOTV. All the pieces of the puzzle have to be addressed, and we are doing that.
States using NCOA for voter verification
As part of that wholistic approach we’ve been chasing voters who’ve been left behind by the Republican Voter Purges as part of our weekly canvasses in Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Some states, like Georgia, actually provide the list of voters to be purged. And that is definitely where Hope Springs volunteers have had the most success keeping (or re-registering) voters on the voter rolls.
Voter purges are an often-flawed process of cleaning up voter rolls by deleting names from registration lists. While updating registration lists as voters die, move, or otherwise become ineligible is necessary and important, when done irresponsibly — with bad data or when two voters are confused for the same person — the process can knock eligible voters off the roll en masse, often with little notice. Many voters discover they’re no longer listed only when they arrive at the polling place. As a result, many eligible Americans either don’t vote or are forced to cast provisional ballots.
There are two ways that Republicans have regularly purged voters in the Swing States. One is based on voter inactivity. VAN allows Hope Springs volunteers to know when a voter is in danger of losing their Right to Vote when they are knocking on their door. And, more often than not, when we find one spouse on that list, the other is there, as well. We’ve also used this as part of our GOTV pitch when the situation (or voter) warrants. This is the wonder of using VAN and the models that can be built from it.
Orange States: State law allows removal from voter rolls based solely on voter's inactivity
The other way is through use of outside lists like the National Change of Address list. Reaching out to voters who make these lists — and i do mean, plural, lists — about their voter status drives a key part of our walk lists or turf. Hope Springs volunteers know when they are talking to a purged voter or someone whose voter status may be pending. But the significance here is that we haven’t yet knocked on all the doors where a voter has been, or could be, purged from the voter rolls.
And this is something that we worry about. We have found voters who were wrongly removed, who still lived at the same address from which they first registered.
Many Hope Springs from Field organizers as well as our volunteers like to think of ourselves as counterweights to Rightwing Voter Suppression. While there are many attempts to do so by using the courts, we have taken up the effort in the field, registering (or, more accurately, re-registering) purged voters, making sure voters who could soon be on the Republican Purge Lists are aware of their status and what they can do about it. At their doors, in the comfort of their neighborhood.
But we don’t just talk to Purged Voters and those under that threat, we talk to their neighbors, making sure voters in the area know, as well. Because we don’t reach them all, and we have found that voters in the area where Purged Voters live are much more likely to vote in the next election when they learn someone in the area (they don’t know who) got purged. Most people we talk to are offended when they find out about it — even if they don’t know who is was. But Republicans are targeting lower income, immigrants and students trying to narrow the electorate so that Trump can win. Because we all know Trump can’t win with a level playing field.
To date, in Georgia, we found and re-registered — and thus returned — 6,460 voters to the rolls. This was achieved through making sure our volunteers who were canvassing were aware that the voter (or someone in that home who answered the door) was aware of the issue. Many times, it involved not just a single visit but some follow-up as well.
But Georgia makes this easy for us. And, thus, we can target voter purges easier. We may not like that they are doing it — especially with all the errors that are being made — but at least they are aboveboard about it. Most other states are not.
We continue to use the same NCOA data to target especially families of college students who fill out Change of Address forms. We noticed early on that this was a pattern from the MAGA groups who claim they care about voter integrity.
Hope Springs from Field volunteers found 1923 other voters in 9 Swing States where NCOA could be used to remove them from the voter rolls. In some cases, they had already been challenged, in other cases, they had similarities to voters who had been challenged. In every case, when we found someone who have been a victim of these mass voter purge requests, we successfully kept them on the voter rolls, often by re-registering them. BTW, we are tracking those voters to see if they vote in this election, because we have found in the past that voters who have been erroneously removed vote at much high rates than they did before.
69.8% of these 1923 people were African-American.
Like i said above, we don’t have to just take it when MAGA Republicans are frontally-assaulting the Right to Vote. And we do have volunteers who love this part of our mission (chasing down voters who have lost, or are about to lose, their Right to Vote). But, again, Hope Springs volunteers are not alone here. We’ve kept our partner Black Churches informed about these Voter Purges, and they’ve located members who are on these lists, as well. And it seems that those congregations aren’t too thrilled that they’ve “been targeted.” To be clear, we don’t take on these missions for any other reason than we want to win elections. Republicans seek to narrow the electorate, Democrats always do better when we are expanding the electorate. Informing (former) voters that they were removed from the voter rolls and re-registering them has been successful in the past in creating more frequent voters among this class of less frequent voters. Expanding our voter base.
Hope Springs from Field has been knocking on doors, serving as a resource to Elections Committees in Black Churches and partnering with local civics and civil rights groups to raise awareness of the fact that Democrats care about our voters and are working to protect their rights. We are thinking about how to mitigate Voter Suppression efforts, get around them and make sure we have "super compliance," both informing and helping our voters meet the requirements and get out and vote.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopevoteprotect
Hope Springs from Field PAC was started by former Obama Field Organizers because field was the cornerstone of our success. Election Protection was central to the Obama primary effort in 2008 because we were running against a party favorite with strong roots in state and local party organizations and we needed to appeal to voters outside that framework. We are returning to the old school basics: looking for patterns, addressing issues that have come up in the past and making sure authorities know about issues that are likely to (or even just may) come up in each election.
We pursue Super-Compliance to New (often racially-motivated) Election Laws through our normal practice of knocking on doors. When needed, we’ve focused our lit on the recent changes but our Issues Survey gives us lots of opportunities to help voters navigate those changes. Making sure voters are registered at their current address is the start. When voters move — and Democrats and progressives are far more likely to move between elections than Republicans — federal law (HAVA) requires them to re-register at their new address. To date, Hope Springs volunteers have registered or re-registered 52,209 people at their doors in Swing States.
Even more have been registered through partnerships, especially our alliance with Black Churches in these Swing States and, as i wrote above, through our Until Justice is Real Project. Almost a fifteen hundred Black Churches have used our access to the Voter Database (VAN) to match their membership records with the voter rolls. This not only allows them to know who isn’t registered but also those whose voter registration does not match the address on their church rolls. The brilliance of this alliance means that people who are not registered are approach discreetly — there are reasons why people aren’t registered to vote, including a lack of citizenship. But most of these churches have Elections Committees or a group that is dedicated to helping their congregants navigate these processes.
Another part of our Super-Compliance effort is making voters, community leaders, pastors as well as influencers aware about Rightwing Voter Intimidation Tactics. But we don’t come to that conversation unarmed. From the beginning, Hope Springs has been collecting information and building a database about problems the voters we talk to (and congregations we are allied with) experienced in prior elections. We collect this data through Incident Reports, and we share that data with other voter protection groups as well as law enforcement. No one claims to be able to predict where there will be an attempt to disrupt the election, but we do know that there are polling places that historically have had issues and it is good to remind law enforcement agencies of that. (It has also got me on quite a few sh*t lists, and a couple of written and verbal threats (which disturb my wife.) Still, it’s not enough to get voters to cast a ballot, we need to make sure those ballots are counted.
But that’s also why the final aspect of GOTV (in those states that allow this) is ballot-curing. While we have yet to be involved in an election where the election went down to making sure all our ballots cast are counted, it’s good practice, and we’ve even had volunteers with experience in chasing down ballots (for ballot curing purposes) go to other states to train volunteers there how to do this.
Voter Protection is the final aspect of these special projects. Sure, it is a regular part of GOTV, but voters do appreciate that we plan and detail that aspect of our GOTV plan in advance. I get that. But both these things will impact the 2024 elections (Abortion and Voter Protection), and it is becoming increasingly obvious that this election will have long-lasting impact on the future of our country.
GOTV has morphed into Voter Protection as well as Election Protection as it focuses on Mobilizing Voters to cast ballots that are counted. It’s an all-year-round thing:
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.
All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.
This is nothing new.
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
In one Michigan town, more than 100 voters were removed after an activist lobbied officials, citing an obscure state law from the 1950s. In the Detroit suburb of Waterford, a clerk removed 1,000 people from the rolls in response to a similar request. The ousted voters included an active-duty Air Force officer who was wrongly removed and later reinstated.
But we are on top of this. Republicans try to narrow the electorate by passing Photo ID laws and we use our canvassing and partnerships with minority communities to organize massive Free Voter Photo ID days at Elections offices. Republicans remove voters “from the rolls en masse” and we target those who’ve been removed to correct the error with the Elections offices or re-register them to vote. Sure, these are really terrible things to be doing to fellow Americans but we don’t have to just take it. The courts aren’t our only recourse, and they are definitely not an immediate recourse. Getting our voters out to vote and cast a ballot that counts is a year-round and requires constant vigilance. Early Organizing allows us to address this.
So the final aspect of our GOTV efforts is Super-Oversight and Poll Protection. I note in almost every post that Hope Springs volunteers walk with Incident Reports (above), something we’ve also distributed to Black Churches and Civic and Civil Rights organizations. We’ve collected 2,300 Incident Reports at voter’s doors but we’ve collected and additional 20,046 Reports in these other ways, mostly from Black Churches in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Voter Protection Tabling
Incident Reports inform our GOTV and Election Protection Plans. While our 2024 GOTV and Election Protection Plans are far from being finalized, we expect them to follow what we did in 2022. We combine Incident Reports with those collected by other groups (like NALEO) to search for patterns of abuse. Voter Suppression or Intimidation can be isolated events, but they are more commonly historical patterns. Repeated incidents, similar events aimed specifically at minority voters, not just in Majority Minority precincts.
And one way you deal with Voter Suppression is through Super-Oversight and Poll Protection. The main reason why Hope Springs from Field is organized as a federal political action committee is because that gives us the ability to request poll watcher credentials in most states. And the Harris, senatorial or Coordinated Campaigns are making sure polls have poll watchers in place, Voter Protection Tabling — including in areas where we make sure there’s a poll watcher inside — is also key. Years of experience has taught us that voters don’t always understand what has happened to them inside the polling place. They may walk away stunned or confused about how they’ve been treated. Voter Protection Tabling allows voters to talk through their experience and discuss with others how it may be remedied.
Here’s the thing: nothing has upset the MAGA-verse in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin than Hope Springs volunteers (and others) pulling out these Incident Reports and recording what has happened. I’d bet most of the threats made against my person have been as a result of this data collection. In our experience, MAGA Intimidators don’t want to provide their name — and they don’t want their attempts at disrupting an election recorded. Arming people with Incident Reports seems to have deterred promised acts of disruption from occurring. And at least one poll worker (that i know of) has thanked us because disruptive behavior stopped inside their poll when someone pulled out an Incident Report. My favorite example of this has to be when several MAGA voters started filming after an Incident Report was brought out (pretty sure they weren’t supposed to film inside the polling place) and when our Poll Watcher asked for their names they quickly decided they were done. We have power — and we need to use it.
