I few days ago I saw a truck in my neighborhood pulling this billboard.
These billboards are sponsored by an organization called ‘Election Integrity Watch.’ After an hour or so I mostly regained my composure, but I’m still not put all the way back together. It’s not quite 1960’s Selma, but we’ve got some of the elements here: threat of violence, call to vigilantism, not-especially-veiled racial targeting, and a more-or-less explicit attempt to suppress voter turnout.
(Quick aside: actual voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Meanwhile, voter turnout remains distressingly low. I feel comfortable standing with those who want more people to vote rather than fewer.)
Since seeing that rolling billboard I’ve felt an urgent need to do something vaguely compensatory — preferably something that won’t land me in jail. At some point during my nonstop monologue about this issue, Josh pointed out that he was already signed up to engage in pro-voting-rights countermeasures, so I called and signed up to volunteer with him on election day.
The Election Protection people ran us through a training about voting rights in Minnesota, assigned us five precincts to monitor, and gave us a checklist of things to watch for, a questionnaire for voters, and some not-very-official-looking badges.
It was all very last-minute, so it wasn’t until we started to set out that we really had misgivings. Our instructions were to arrive at a polling place, check in with the election judges, and then retreat a safe distance from the polls and interview voters as they exited. The instructions also included in many places this sentence: “No one except election officials and people waiting to register or to vote can be within 100 feet of the building in which a polling place is located.” So, that didn’t make a lot of sense — how were we to observe the polling place and introduce ourselves to the election judges from 100 feet outside the building?
In the interest of good faith we tried following the script anyway. Sure enough, as soon as we introduced ourselves to the chief election judge at Bryn Mawr Elementary she politely read us the riot act and escorted us to the exit. Interviewing exiting voters was out of the question because voters were parking on the property, so all voters were safely behind rolled-up-windows before they exited the protection zone.
We compromised on just doing drive-bys for the other precincts. There wasn’t any obvious monkey business going on outside, and after an hour or so we’d scoped out all the polling places so I called our team leader to report our experiences (and to call him out a bit for sending us on a fool’s errand). My first two attempted calls to the team leader got me a robotic “Please enter your mailbox number now” which definitely played up the snipe hunt aspects of the afternoon, but I eventually got through to him, said, in essence, ‘this is a waste of time’ and then we knocked off for the day.
Our experience in Bryn Mawr was actually mostly a good one. If we were hustled out immediately, it’s safe to assume that anyone trying to hassle voters would have been ejected just as quickly. Still, getting shooed out of the polling place left us both feeling very sheepish. In retrospect, there’s no particular reason why the election judges should know or care to distinguish between people representing ‘Election Integrity’ (the bad guys) and ‘Election Protection’ (us). And now if I hear news reports about voter-intimidating vigilantes showing up at polling places, I won’t know for sure that they aren’t talking about me. It’s not like I had a chance to say “But wait, we’re here to ensure voting rights! Ensure!”
I still don’t know what to do about those damn billboards.