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Georgia Starts the Summer Strong: Finding Purged Voters, Organizing Photo ID Days & More! [1]

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Date: 2024-06-06  

There was a mere 5 volunteer difference between the #1 and #2 state in volunteer turnout on Saturday. Georgia has been one of our most “competitive” states, meaning that organizers and volunteers in Georgia follow our weekly states rollouts closely. 5 people. Even though Georgia doesn’t have a Senate race on the ballot this year, and the presidential election doesn’t seem as close as it was in 2020 (i don’t remember Biden being within 5 points of Trump at anytime in 2020, but what do i know?), our Georgia volunteers still have reasons to come out each week.

Gov. Kemp and Georgia Republicans have done everything that can to keep African-American voters from actually being able to cast a ballot that is counted. One of the nice things about Hope Springs from Field PAC [website] has been our ability to utilize prior experience and best practices to counter these efforts. So, for example, when Georgia instituted a Voter Photo ID requirement, we already had Obama alums who had experience in helping Democratic voters in Texas get the documents and help arrange transportation in order to get their photo IDs. And we continue to schedule Voter Photo ID Days at the Registrar’s offices in Georgia. Most of the voters who have taken advantage of this have come from the Black Churches, but we do still find voters at their doors who don’t have a photo ID.

There’s also been a concerted effort in Georgia to remove voters from the voting rolls in bluer areas and precincts — something that the Obama campaign dealt with in 2012 in Wisconsin. Reaching out to voters who makes these lists — and i do mean, plural, lists — about their voter status continues to drive a key part of our walk lists or turf. Hope Springs volunteers know when they are talking to a purged voter or someone whose voter status may be pending. But the significance here, in discussing beginning canvassing before we would have last year, is that we haven’t yet knocked on all the doors where a voter has been, or could be, purged from the voter rolls. We haven’t, as i was reminded, even knocked on half those doors in the counties where we are canvassing, something we’d like to correct before Labor Day.

But our third “special” project (special meaning unique to Georgia and a few other Southern states) is the lingering connection between lower than average voter registration among African-Americans in counties with a history of higher than average of lynchings going back a century or more.

Williams’ map on counties by lynching history (redder is worse)

This lingering history was discovered by Jhacova Williams, who wrote that “Black Americans who reside in counties in the South where there was a higher number of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 have lower voter registration today.” Hope Springs has been using this data to target Voter Registration efforts in those counties in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. We have been relying on HBCU graduates and Divine 9 alums to reach out in those counties (we usually target 1 or 2 a week).

Finally, our fourth “special” project (again, special meaning something that is confined to a few other states) are forewarning and preparing minority voters for the election-year changes that Kemp signed into law that encourage voter eligibility challenges on the part of average citizens in Georgia. “The laws are the most sweeping revision of Georgia elections since the 2021 voting law, which primarily focused on absentee ballot regulations.”

New Georgia Congressional District map

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/6/2245096/-Georgia?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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