Thanks to a diary I read here on Daily Kos a few weeks ago (I can’t find the diary now to thank that writer but I’m SO appreciative — and this is why I love DKos), I signed up as a volunteer to work on the PA Dems Voter Assistance Hotline. I did my first shift yesterday, and wanted to share some positive news about the experience.
The hotline is run by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party (they go by PA Dems), but it is available to any voter of any political party affiliation. I’ll say upfront that I have been VERY impressed with how organized and well-run the hotline operation is — it should be viewed as a model for every state imho. I went through two thorough hotline trainings via Zoom, they have an extensive voter assistance manual to help hotline workers answer just about any question, and they have a sophisticated technology infrastructure supporting the entire operation. So if you’re in PA you should feel particularly proud of the work that your state Democratic Party is doing.
The hotline is an entirely remote operation, so hotline workers can be located anywhere in the country. Back in the day when I volunteered for political campaign’s hotlines or phonebanking operations, we were all in the same big room answering calls or making calls. There was a lot of excitement and energy with that kind of in-person experience, but apparently those are things of the past. Oh well.
Anyway, i worked my first three-hour shift yesterday afternoon. Most of the calls I got were from voters asking questions related to mail-in ballots (MIB). As background, PA only started doing MIB in 2019. Before then you had to request an absentee ballot and provide a valid excuse for why you couldn’t vote in person on election day, but now they have no-excuse mail-in ballots available to all voters in the state. So it’s still a relatively new thing for the state. PA does not have early voting in the sense of going to a polling place and voting on a machine, but voters can go to an election office or early voting/satellite location and request an MIB, fill it out on site and hand it back in — so this is PA’s current version of “early voting” (although not every county calls it that). In the hotline training they told us that they expect 20-25% of PA voters to vote by mail this year. (And a reminder that in PA they are not allowed to process and count MIBs until 7 am on election day, which is why the early returns in the state are likely to skew Republican but then shift to our side as the MIBs start getting counted.)
Counties have just started sending out MIBs to those who have requested them in the past week or so, and some are just starting this week. So some of my calls were about people wondering when they’d receive their MIB in the mail, or concerned that they had not yet received it. I was able to tell them when their county started sending them out (every county is different), I could look them up to make sure they were on the list to receive a MIB, etc. Some people are also receiving damaged ballots, so I was able to give them options on how they could deal with that.
Every caller was sincerely appreciative of the assistance, as you would expect. But what I really wanted to share with you was that pretty much every caller shared with me how determined they were to vote. The would tell me that this election was more important then ever, or that this year in particular they really wanted to make sure to vote. I got a sense of passion and determination from all of the callers to vote this year even if facing obstacles — like getting a damaged ballot, not being on the list to receive an MIB even though they said they signed up for one, being out of the country for two months and needing to vote before they left, etc. One caller hadn’t received her MIB yet and decided to just go in person to her local election office to get it done — she didn’t want to wait around any longer for it to come in the mail). “I just have to make sure to vote, especially this year,” she kept saying excitedly to me. Also, I’m not sure whether or not to read anything into this, but all but one of my callers were women.
Although I didn’t know the political affiliation of any of the callers, I got the sense that most of them were going to vote blue by the way that they talked about the importance of this election. I don’t think that R voters would have that same sense of urgency, and I’m guessing that Dem voters are likely to be most comfortable with calling a PA Dems hotline — I can’t see a MAGA voter doing that. I could be wrong (but I don’t think I am!).
So, take heart that in the critical state of Pennsylvania there are a lot of voters out there who are really, really determined to vote this year, and there is a really impressive Democratic Party operation in the state to help them do that.
UPDATE
HT to Explorer8939 for sharing early voting numbers as tabulated by NBC News. Here’s the early voting numbers for PA so far:
- Democrats: 74%
- Republicans: 19%
- Other: 7%
As I mentioned, early MIB voting has just started in PA so these numbers represent just 21,656 ballots and things can change, of course. But still these early figures for PA are encouraging (much better than the opposite for sure) and reflect my experience.
NOTE: Some of you have asked about where the party affiliation numbers for early voting come from, and in the small print NBC News notes that “party registration is based on a combination of state-provided partisanship (when available) and TargetSmart’s model of party affiliation.” I’m not an expert on this, but it seems that in states where voters don’t identify their party affiliation the early voting numbers are based on estimates.
In addition, Democrats are FAR OUTPACING Republicans in PA in terms of requesting mail-in ballots. Here are the data from the PA Secretary of State as of 10/3/24 for mail-in ballot requests by party affiliation (PA voters have until 10/29 to request a MIB):
- Democrats: 921,980 (62%)
- Republicans: 401,051 (27%)
- Other: 168,392 (11%)
This also jibes with my sense that most of the voters calling the hotline asking MIB-related questions were Democratic voters. The NY Times reported on this huge advantage for Democrats in PA a few days ago.
FYI, here are the early voting numbers for entire country:
- Democrats: 52%
- Republicans: 31%
- Other 17%
Also, Minnesota and Virginia were among the first states to start early voting, on Sept. 20, so their early voting numbers might be especially telling:
Minnesota:
- Democrats: 52%
- Other: 35%
- Republicans: 13%
Virginia:
- Democrats: 53%
- Republicans: 39%
- Other: 8%
