Finding campaigning workarounds adapted to the coronavirus pandemic has occupied me for months. Outdoor festivals and campaign rallies normally ramp up in late August and early September. July and August heat normally tamp down campaign events at this time in the cycle. But nothing like a global pandemic has.
National-level consultants seem to have shifted not to outside-the-box approaches but to familiar, contactless voter-engagement tactics. Can’t knock doors? Make more phone calls. Can’t hold rallies? Do more text-messaging. And, naturally, more digital ads.
This remote activism and socially distanced preparation for the fall leaves voter registration numbers tanking. Voter registration is normally a haphazard, face-to-face, person-to-person activity. In the summer of COVID-19, there are no voter registration volunteers with clipboards registering voters at outdoor events that are cancelled, nor on downtown street corners on the weekends.
The pandemic may be affecting potential voters across the political spectrum, but Politico reports Republicans have an edge. A report from Democratic data firm TargetSmart found people who are registering are older, whiter, and less Democratic:
The report seemed to confirm what state elections officials and voter registration groups had been seeing in the field for weeks: Neither Democrats nor Republicans had been registering many voters during the pandemic. But Democrats were suffering disproportionately from the slowdown.
Last month in Iowa, where the race between Trump and Joe Biden is surprisingly close, Republicans nosed back ahead of Democrats in active registrations after ceding the lead to Democrats for the first time in years.
“In some states, before the pandemic, you were seeing a net edge for Democrats,” said Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, which works to register young people, people of color and unmarried women.
Now, she said, “in some states … the advantage has shrunk substantially.”
Gardner calls the pandemic closures and stay-at-home orders a “perfect, horrible storm in terms of undercutting registration efforts, and undercutting people’s ability to get registered.”
TargetSmart finds Republican registrations edging Democrats’ in Florida, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. All of which adds a measure of uncertainty to an election cycle already rife with uncertainties.
For the first time this year, North Carolina is allowing eligible citizens with DMV-issued IDs to register to vote online. As of January, 39 states plus the District of Columbia already allowed online registration. The catch is that people not already registered are not that politically engaged. Because they are not registered, they have no voter histories and don’t appear in voter lists used by parties to contact likely voters. Even if they can register to vote from the comfort of their own homes with a cell phone or computer, who is going to tell them?
The Wisconsin Elections Commission in late June mailed out 200,000 postcards to citizens identified as eligible to vote but unregistered. They explained in a June 25 press release:
The WEC sends these postcards because of Wisconsin’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center (https://ericstates.org), which helps states improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens. Wisconsin sent similar postcard mailings to 1.28 million eligible but unregistered residents in 2016 and 384,000 residents in 2018.
ERIC helps the Wisconsin Elections Commission develop the mailing lists of eligible but unregistered residents. ERIC starts with a list of people who have been issued a driver license or a state ID card by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation since the previous mailing. ERIC compares that list to Wisconsin’s statewide voter registration system to find eligible but unregistered residents. Names of people currently serving a felony sentence were removed from the mailing list, as were people who have asked to be removed from the active voter list. Also taken off the mailing list are people who recently moved without providing the USPS with a forwarding address.
ERIC also filters out deceased DMV customers by cross-checking the last four digits of Social Security numbers against the Social Security Death Master (SSDM) list. If this is a new feature, improved algorithms may avoid past confusion when dead people and those already registered received postcards in 2016.
North Carolina is not an ERIC member. But thirty other states plus the District of Columbia have access to the service, even Texas. Washington, New Mexico, and West Virginia have sent such postcards in the past. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, how many ERIC member states are inviting the unregistered to participate in 2020?
If I had the facility and funding to do this myself, my mailings would be more targeted, naturally. But as former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon once observed, “the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and [the better] they represent the actual values of the electorate.”
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.