If you are as terminally online as I am regarding politics, you undoubtedly saw plenty of reminders about today being National Voter Registration Day. I honestly did not know such a thing existed until a year ago when Taylor Swift famously encouraged her fans to register, resulting in more than 35,000 new voter sign-ups via Vote.org. It’s still unclear how many registrations were completed following her endorsement after presidential endorsement last week, but one has to assume this number must be even higher. At the very least, she’s managed to energize a legion of Swifties and the Swift-adjacent, especially in the swing states.
It’s easy to view National Voter Registration Day as a deadline, as a job completed. But to my mind, it’s simply the starting gun. States have different deadlines to register, and the majority of them close in a few weeks, which means there is still time to get more people signed up. But after this point is when the real work begins, which is getting out the vote. And as we know well, the GOP is working tirelessly to make that an impossible task for Democrats, particularly in the swing states.
In addition to Georgia’s attempts to purge voter rolls, the early voting debacle in North Carolina—thanks to the king of the weirdos and mendacious election spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the governmental meshegas surrounding the abortion measures on the Florida and Missouri ballots, now comes Pennsylvania and the court battle regarding mail-in voting. tl;dr: the state supreme court just overturned a lower court’s decision that the commonwealth could not disqualify any mail-in ballots where the voter wrote in an incorrect date (Edit: just popping back in to note that the GOP-led state legislature in PA, as well as those in other red states, have been passing waves of ridiculous laws like this since Trump won in 2016). From the New York Times, “Friday’s ruling means that state election officials will not be counting misdated or undated ballots in the general election unless the courts decide to intervene again between now and Nov. 5.” That’s a very big ‘unless.’
So I have my eyes on groups helping to get out the vote, like Vote Forward, Field Team Six, Vote Save America, and others to see how to help with postcarding, phonebanking, and texting campaigns. I’m also still doing my own stuff like asking local businesses in my town to post my signs about voting and including info cards in the orders I receive through my Etsy shop. (And, doing embarrassing things like cornering the poor UPS Store guy who handled my latest print order and asking him if he’s registered to vote.) For those who have asked, here is a link to a print-ready PDF of the poster I made, which features non-regionally specific housekeeping at bottom; it’s an simple print job through your local UPS store or Staples. Big ups to Toni at CKO Kickboxing for being the first business owner to hang up my sign! Onward.