Between 15 and 26 million people protested, in the largest protest movement in US history — if they all vote, could that be a game-changer? “Protesting the murder of George Floyd, Washington, DC, 6.6.20.” Photo by Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 2.0) Flickr.

If you think defeating Trump is the most important task for progressives and socialists, here are some things you can do and organizations that can help you do them. While it’s always important to volunteer, volunteers are especially important since enthusiasm for Biden is low and his volunteer operation lags. Fortunately, enthusiastic loathing of Trump easily overcompensates for Biden’s enthusiasm deficit. Let’s look at how we can help turn that loathing into votes.

This article has three parts:

Part I Basic information about how to vote — links to websites that will guide you to register to vote; find your polling place; vote by mail, vote early, vote on election day, become a poll watcher or poll worker, or even a deputy registrar. If you’re in a swing state, what you do matters nationally. But if you aren’t, your vote is still important for down ballot races and ballot measures, such as Illinois’ Fair Tax Amendment.

Part II “Get Out The Vote,”  is for people who want to work with voter mobilization groups to get others to vote — their websites show how easy it is.

Part III has important information about voting in Chicago and Illinois. If you’re in a blue state like Illinois, it may seem less urgent to vote. This section highlights votes that will make a huge difference in Chicago and Illinois.

I. Basic information: Registering, voting by mail and in person.
First, of course, register to vote, know your polling place, decide whether to vote by mail, vote early, or vote on election day. But once you’ve done that, there is an easy and intuitive step you can take to multiply your impact. You can share your information — talk to family, friends, people in your workplace or community to find out if they plan to vote and help them answer any questions they have about how to vote and about candidates. In fact, some of the GOTV organizations take this as an organizing model. For example, Rock the Vote asks you to get three friends to vote, MoveON helps you build a team of ten.

Most people don’t know if they can register online or vote by mail, but most states allow both. Forty states offer online registration, and one more, Oklahoma, is phasing it in. As for voting by mail, only seven states require an excuse, and some even send all registered voters an application. You can see your details here in a cool NY Times infographic.  (Don’t get so busy you can’t stop and smell the infographics.)

Here is another website that can answer your questions with another smartly designed infographic: Fivethirtyeight’s “How to Vote in the 2020 Election,” with information for all 50 states and DC.

Ballotpedia is, as the name indicates, a comprehensive collection of information on the elections in every state, with information on candidates and some local ballot measures, including who supports and opposes them. (Maybe they will update; right now, for local ballot measures, it’s best go to your city and county board of elections site.)

Out-of-state college students: Do you want to vote in your college’s state or in your home state? If you’re in one of 17 battleground states, your vote there can make more of a difference. And since all this work is being done remotely over the web (including phone and text banking), you don’t have to travel home to do it (or to vote).  See at the end for a note on why voting in Illinois matters also.

How to register, vote, or mobilize others to vote
Do you want to register, vote by mail, vote in person, become a poll worker, fill out your census form? Vote.org will walk you through the steps.

There are many other sites that do similar things: The League of Women Voters set up vote411.org, winner of the 2020 People’s Voice Webby Award. They walk first-time voters through the steps, let you explore voting info by state, sign up as a poll worker, with training, in your community. Because so many poll workers are elderly and concerned about exposure to coronavirus, volunteering as a poll worker is especially important in this election. They also give you phone numbers if you need to report problems at your polling place. Their Illinois site is here.

More Than A Vote, which LeBron James and other athletes founded, focuses on recruiting poll workers in the Black community, crucial because coronavirus has led to a shortage of poll workers, leading to long delays in voting.

II. Get Out The Vote: What you can do
If you want to join a Get Out The Vote campaign, there are many groups you can work with. Even if you don’t plan to join a campaign, you might want to watch their training videos. They distill the experience of veteran organizers and, also, the research of political scientists about what works and what doesn’t work in voter contacts.

Phone Banking, Text Banking, Writing letters

The phone banking app makes the calling easy. Screen shot from Sierra Club training.

Canvassing by phone has replaced door-knocking — except for the Trump campaign, whose proprietary magic protects them from the virus. You can phone bank or text bank with a number of progressive organizations, with an easy-to-use web platform which allows you to check off voter responses as you make the calls. They typically offer video training by Zoom before you canvas, and debriefing afterwards, in which you can talk about your experience with the small group you were working with. The process is simple: You wait for the automatic dialer to connect you, talk from a script, and check off responses on the website. You can use your computer or your smart phone. And you aren’t using your own phone number, if you are using your computer; a phone number is created by the app. The phone contacts don’t allow the face-to-face engagement of door-to-door canvassing, but research shows it is a more efficient use of resources, at least for mobilizing voters. And any contact with voters is an education, takes us out of our familiar community.

Here are a few of the groups offering phonebanking.
Swing Left, like most of these efforts, focuses on the battleground states, and connects you with groups in your zip code that are also targeting them. If you live in a swing state, you can connect with an organizer. Depending on your zip code, you might be connected with a Swing Left group or with one of the groups below.

MoveOn.org, also focuses on battleground states. If you live in one of those states, it’s more effective to register to vote and organize to mobilize voters there rather than where you go to college. Some organizations train you to do phone or text banking, but MoveOn wants to train you to organize others to set up your own vote team. I’m giving more space to MoveOn not as a particular endorsement, but because their organizational model makes sense for volunteers new to vote mobilization —  begin with people you know, organize them, and maybe organize them to become organizers of others. It’s one of the simplest and most rewarding things we can do — talk to people in our personal networks — family, friends, people in our workplace, school or community.

This is an intuitive organizing model — many people figure out how to do this sort of thing without professional training, and it can scale up, if the people you organize go on to organize new groups, who go on to organize …

You might be surprised to find some friends and family who don’t know they can register online or vote by mail. If they haven’t voted for a while, moved, or haven’t voted for the first time, you can be especially helpful. Mobilize to Win, a project of moveon.org sister organizations, has a handbook designed for these conversations: The Vote Mobilizers Handbook outlines a simple method for working with your contacts, and they also offer training over Zoom. The handbook suggests putting together a team of ten people to talk about voting, to learn how to register, to vote by mail or where to vote in person, then putting together plans to register, or vote by mail or in person, follow up later. One of their modules addresses how to talk to friends who were not thinking of voting (“things to say and not to say”). If after this you have a taste for organizing, Mobilize to Win, which focuses on the swing states, shows you ways to go further to work with other groups and communities. You can sign up here, or watch recordings of their trainings on mobilization strategy, identifying “our people,” how to have effective conversations with them, and mobilizing to get out the vote. Their handbook is here — worth reading even if you don’t plan to volunteer.

Rock the Vote is another organization that promotes appealing to personal networks  — get three friends to vote, and plan a Votefest. “We believe voting should be social, communal, and celebrated.” They offer toolkits for planning votefests, info on how to vote, and a large number of volunteer opportunities, including video editing and graphic design, as well as registering voters, texting and doing social media.

Indivisible Chicago  has 17 neighborhood groups in Chicago and suburbs. Sign up for daily actions, trainings, rallies, phone banking and text banking to voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, or to be a pollwatcher or hotline volunteer. Indivisible uses TurboVote, which allows you and your contacts to request absentee ballots and register to vote online in states like Illinois that allow online voter registration.

#Vote Trump Out/Then Challenge Biden campaign was launched by Roots Action, founded by media critics/activists Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. They offer  “Facebook Deep Canvassing,” with training, as well as voting information, a helpful FAQ if you’re going to get into discussions with friends (including friends who are voting Green, or not voting), and graphics for you to use in your own personal social media campaign.

Sierra Club. I watched this training video, which will show you how they do telephone phone banking. The organizer is excellent, lucid and concise. She will show you how to use the phone banking platform, which you can do from your computer or your phone (again, your phone number isn’t used if you make calls from your computer). You can sign up for training sessions and phone banking here.  They have a two-stage strategy with different goals. The first is to clean up their voter lists, on the assumption that it’s too soon to try to get undecided contacts to commit to voting; they are best contacted in the two weeks before the election. So in this training video, the goal is to build a list of Democratic supporters and collect information about voter preferences. Voter lists are notoriously inaccurate; there are multiple phone numbers associated with a name, people have moved, phone numbers are out of service or reassigned. In October, every minute will be critical for getting out the vote, and no time should be spent calling wrong numbers, Trump voters, people who decided not to vote.

Women’s March just sent out an email blast saying they sent and received two million texts to women in battleground states reminding them to register and vote. You can sign up for the Women’s March volunteer hub here to join them in Text Back Tuesdays for text banking and Sisterhood Sundays for phone banking, Digital Defenders to engage on social media, or join a Women2Women Circle in your community to do local organizing.

Working Families Party  has organized phone and text banking in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

The NAACP’s Black Voices Change Lives campaign mobilizes Black voters, providing tools, resources and training, focusing on 12 Black battleground states. They welcome volunteers, including people who don’t identify as Black.

The Black-Led Organizing Fund lists 41 groups throughout the country, many doing community organizing in Black communities as well as GOTV.

Joe Biden’s campaign also is looking for volunteers to do phone banking.

These are just a few of the very many GOTV groups. I’ve never gotten so many calls for GOTV volunteers in my email inbox or social media.

Do you want to register voters?
You can become an appointed Deputy Voter Registrar. You need to be trained under a sponsor organization and then you can register a qualified voter anywhere in Illinois, help people register online in some other states, give people information on voting in Illinois and other states. Sponsor organizations include The League of Women Voters and Indivisible Illinois.

III. Illinois.  Illinois is not a battleground state, Trump will lose, but voting still matters. There are downballot candidates who need your support — and you will have a long list of judges, many of whom are racist, misogynist, or just mean and abusive. By October, progressive watchdogs in Chicago and Cook County will publish lists of judges with their bar association ratings and information about their conduct in office. Then you can check  voteforjudges.org and injusticewatch.org for election guides, and put together your personal list of abusive judges who must go. Injusticewatch posts a lot of research besides the ratings of the BAR associations, and does regular news reporting on the criminal justice system.  I’ll also post an article with some information on Chicago-area judges.

The most important vote you can cast in Illinois is not for a candidate: Progressives and the social justice movement support the  Illinois Fair Tax amendment to the Illinois Constitution  —  a progressive income tax replacing the current flat tax. Our flat tax imposes the same rate, 4.95%, on all Illinois taxpayers, allowing billionaires to pay the same percentage tax as minimum-wage workers. The Fair Tax is fiercely opposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Chicago Tribune editorial board (who would have thought!), and people like hedge-fund billionaire and Art Institute Board member Ken Griffin, who pumped $46.7 million into the campaign to defeat it. “Ken Griffin wants your taxes to go up sharply so that his go up hardly at all,” writes the Sun-Times in an editorial. Only taxpayers earning over $250,000 will pay more, and people earning less than that will get a tax cut. Fred Klonsky points out how our flat tax expands the racial wealth gap, imposing an unequal burden on Black and brown families. “Households in Black and Brown communities with income under $250,000 paid an additional $4 billion in taxes over 20 years than they would have under the Fair Tax. That is $4 billion that the rich did not pay.”

I’ll write more about the candidates and ballot measures in October. I’ll just add that if your main issue is reforming the criminal justice system, you may want to do your phone banking for States Attorney Kim Foxx. She is the candidate supported by progressive unions and activists, as well as mainstream Democrats. She is opposed by a Republican law-and-order candidate, a former judge supported by the racist police union.  Foxx has stood for criminal justice reform, implementing a wide range of measures to lower the prison population, from reforming the cash bail system, to reducing prosecutions for minor non-violent crimes, exonerations of the wrongfully convicted, and ending prosecution for non-payment of fines. Kim Foxx’s campaign wants volunteers to make phone calls and host events.

Basic info on how to vote in Illinois:

You can register to vote online here. You can “pre-register,” if you will turn 18 by Nov.3. You can check to see if you are already registered here. You can only register online for this election until 10/18/2020, but there are many places, including public libraries, where you can register in person up to Oct. 6, and a different “grace period” list where you can register in person from Oct. 7 through election day.  The League of Women Voters has an excellent summary here.

You can apply to vote by mail here  if you’re in Cook County.   If you applied for a mail ballot or think you have but haven’t received it in the mail, you can check the status of your online voter application here.  

You can mail your ballot or you can drop it in a “vote by mail ballot drop box, locations are here.

You can find information about early voting locations  here and your polling place here.

Early voting begins Sept. 24 and ends Nov. 2.

—Paul Elitzik