“Get Out the Vote” is a national effort to register new voters and to push back against restrictions to voting imposed through new requirements for photo ID and birth certificates purportedly necessary to deal with the non-existing problem of voter fraud, GOTV advocates claim.
After a recent voter registration event at its MacArthur Highway office, Peoria NAACP president Don Jackson sounded a bit frustrated.
“I don’t think they understand the significance of what could happen in their lives if they don’t get involved, the importance of the issues,” Jackson said. “Simply having a job isn’t enough to take care of your family. The process is slow, but we’ll keep going.
“It can be a real challenge,” he continued, “like when I run in to a union member working in the public sector who hasn’t even registered. I think, ‘How can that be?’
“For Get-Out-The Vote [efforts], we do everything we possibly can,” he added. “We don’t tell people how to vote; we say to vote your conscience. Churches help, providing vans, and we encourage people to take early ballots. We’re even running radio commercials on rock stations to try to reach 18 to 30-year-old people.”
Peorian Sheldon Schafer, a Green Party activist running as a write-in candidate for Illinois Secretary of State, said, “I can certainly understand where someone is coming from, thinking that there’s no point in registering because their vote won’t matter [but] registering to vote is important even if you don’t have confidence in the current offerings the two parties are bringing to the table. If you’re unhappy with the system and want things to change, you HAVE to be a registered voter. You can’t even sign a petition for a candidate for a third party unless you’re a registered voter. Even in primary elections, where I, as a potential Green Party candidate, am prohibited from voting, non-partisan ballots are available so that I can vote on the issues and referenda. Being a registered voter is essential if we are to ever change the system.”
Getting people ready, willing and able to vote are important to labor, too.
“We have 6 to 10 people staffing our phone banks every night, from 5 to 8 o’clock,” said the Illinois Federation of Labor’s Jason Keller, who’s coordinating the program in Peoria. “It’s not difficult to get volunteers, even though a lot of them work 8 to 5, then come in here and work 5 to 8. Everyone knows it’s important.”
At the Peoria Democrats’ annual picnic Sept. 13 at the Itoo Pavillion, Peoria County Democrats Central Committee chairman Billy Halstead said, “We have Get-Out-The-Vote [GOTV] activities every election, but now we’re using email, social media, anything to let people know basic information: polling place locations, hour, early voting and especially absentee voting, which you can do for any reason now. Voting at home: It can’t get any easier.
“We are concerned with ‘drop-off’ votes. Thousands of people [statewide] cast ballots in presidential elections but not in mid-term elections,” he continued. “We also do door-to-door canvassing of neighborhoods, but we don’t register people. We refer them to voter registrars or encourage them to go online.”
In Peoria, there’s peoriavotes.com; nationally, there’s the nonpartisan, nonprofit turbovote.org.
While poll taxes and literacy tests are history, voter suppression remains a worry. On Nov. 4, almost half of America’s voters will face restrictions not in place in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO. Most such changes were justified by claims of widespread voter fraud.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who spoke at Bradley University in April, in 2011 said, “Voting rights are “under attack [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students (and) minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”
Asked about voter fraud, Halstead laughed and said, “Anybody involved with politics or elections knows better.”
Indeed, proof of voter fraud is so rare as to be nonexistent, according to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which said, “The evidence of significant voter fraud is zero.”
In Illinois, next month’s ballot will have a Right to Vote Amendment. If approved, it would add to the state’s constitution an affirmative right to register and vote.
“I just tell people: Please remember to exercise your right, right that African-Americans and women fought hard for,” Halstead said. “And realize – after everything you have – what if they took away the right to vote? Not voting is the same result.“
(Peoria County Republicans’ chair Katherine Coyle, and elected Republicans from the City Council and County Board did not respond to requests for comment.)