Hope Springs volunteers are determined to fill vacuums that exist in our systems of elections. The missing pieces that help Democrats win on Election Day. Over the last 4 years, Early Organizing has been a core mission ever since victory in the 2021 Georgia Senate Runoffs. But what that means in every Swing State is different. In Georgia and North Carolina, part of that core mission is helping voters, who don’t have one, obtain a free Voter Photo ID so they can vote. In Ohio, we pass along the paperwork to help those voters obtain a free Ohio ID and in Arizona, we make sure that seniors know they can get a free State ID card. We’ve also been canvassing with the paperwork needed to bypass the Photo ID law in North Carolina, as well.
Last year, Hope Springs organized and sponsored 241 (Free) Voter ID days in Georgia and North Carolina counties at their county Elections offices. This year, we’ve already conducted 36 (Free) Voter ID days in Georgia and North Carolina.
Hope Springs from Field believes in not only in encouraging Super Compliance for voters, but in making these voters feel safe and free from embarrassment in doing so. In Georgia and North Carolina, we’ve been organizing Free Voter Photo ID Days at their local Registrar’s or Board of Elections offices. And we’ve been doing this from the beginning. On June 12th, 2021, Hope Springs volunteers began canvassing in the Black Belt of Georgia, repeating our steps in the Georgia Senate Runoff, with a special emphasis on helping voters without the newly required photo IDs to obtain them. In 2022, we had to expand this effort into North Carolina after the (state) Supreme Court reversed itself on North Carolina’s photo ID decision.
Everywhere that Hope Springs volunteers canvassed (where the law requires voters to show a Photo ID (and Arizona, where a non-photo ID is required)), we’ve informed voters of the new voter laws and requirements, making sure they were aware of the promise that these photo ID cards would be available without cost at their local Elections office.
This was a shared responsibility. People who don’t have a photo ID generally have reasons why they don’t have one. And often there is a cost involved that the voter can’t afford. In my years of helping people get IDs in order to vote, i can remember one voter (in Texas) whose cost for all the documentation she needed to get an ID was well over $300. Legislating a “Free Photo ID” rarely means it is free to the voter. But we have often found, in preparing a voter to obtain their “Free” Photo ID, that our Black Church partners and even some Divine Nine chapters eager to help voters out in this regard. Like i said, shared responsibility. We go to great lengths to make sure that voters have what they need to cast their ballots and have their vote counted.
Last year, our 241 (free) Voter Photo ID days helped 56,217 voters get the required photo identification they needed to vote in their state. 79.7% of these voters were African-American and 64.3% were older than 60 years old. 69.7% of them were female.
Here’s the thing: out of the 56,217 voters in Georgia and North Carolina, 42,387 of them voted in 2024. That’s ten percentage points higher than the national average. Granted, these voters got extra attention from their local Black Churches and they got post cards reminding them of their newly-found freedom to vote but still.
This year, 26.3% of the people who have participated in free Voter Photo ID days have been found at the door. The rest were found by our partner Black Churches in their own community outreach.
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.
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 own neighborhood.
We pursue Super-Compliance to New (often racially-motivated) Election Laws through our normal practice of knocking on doors.
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. This means helping voters get free Photo Voter IDs.
So far, Hope Springs volunteers & organizers, along with our partnered Black Church’s Election Committees and volunteers, have seen 1,749 show up for one of our (Free) Voter ID days in Georgia and North Carolina, all but 18 of them African-American. We’ve distributed 582 Free ID palm cards in Ohio — all but 11 of them Caucasian. And we’ve help 31 Hispanic seniors get their free state ID card. We are just beginning our efforts for the 2026 election cycle!
But there is one surprising fact in this regard. Very few of the voters that we have registered in our special voter registration project targeting African-American neighborhoods in Georgia, North Carolina and northern Florida for several years now, needed Photo IDs from the county elections offices. They were good to go.
Georgia Counties with historically higher rates of lynchings are redder
We’ve also been focusing on registering voters in counties with historically high (prior) levels of lynching ever since we were exposed to Jhacova Williams’ groundbreaking work on race and voter registration. Williams wrote that “Black Americans who reside in counties in the South where there was a higher number of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 have lower voter registration today.” We are replicating this work in Texas, as well.
Hope Springs has been using this data to target Voter Registration efforts in those counties in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and Texas. We canvass these areas with the additional goals of getting people to register to vote, finding mentors to help them through the entire voting process and building understanding or recognition that there are cultural reasons why and how voting has been discouraged in their community. It’s an incredibly eye-opening experience for both the volunteer and the voters with whom we’ve engaged.
N Carolina Counties with historically higher rates of lynchings are redder
But Williams’ theory about the connection between higher rates of extrajudicial murders and voter suppression is born out by the fact that African-Americans participate in other government services (like obtaining a Driver’s License or other forms of photo identification) at apparently equal or higher rates than African-Americans in other counties.
We consider this effort to be correcting tragic historical errors, reaching back to the Declaration of Independence and it’s promise that All Men (& Women) are Created Equal. It has become a labor of love for both organizers and volunteers, as well as some of the outside volunteers who have been recruited to knock on doors in this regard.
Hope Springs from Field volunteers believe that, if we can reverse this historical trend, not just by voter registration but voter mobilization, we can reverse a couple of these less Republican Congrssional seats in these states, but especially in North Carolina. Still, our (overwhelmingly) African-American volunteers who canvass in those counties, they are (admittedly) less interested in reversing gerrymandered seats than in reversing historical inequities. This being a mutually beneficial project.
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.
We have power — and we need to exercise it.
We can all do more. Of course, the easiest thing that any of us can do is to contribute. We realize not everyone can, just as not everyone has the patience, knowledge and skillset to walk people through the process of obtaining a photo id. But if you support our grassroots efforts to protect the vote, especially in minority communities, I hope you will.
By starting early, and aiming towards super-compliance with these really, really onerous provisions, Hope Springs from Field PAC seeks to undermine that strategy, while informing voters about the new laws and regulations aimed at them. There’s a lot of work to be done, but fortunately, the three states that are making it most difficult are also states in which you can knock on doors at least 10 months out of the year. And, with your help, we will be there, getting our people to super-comply with these restrictive provisions.
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopevoteprotect
You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather contribute by check). Thank you for your support. This work depends upon you!
