GOTV OH: an update

It’s been nearly three weeks since I first posted about our plans to help get out the vote in Ohio and how we arrived at those plans. Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to in those three weeks. Beyond our full-time jobs our time was dedicated to two broad themes: educating ourselves about the voting process in Ohio and GOTV activities supporting it; and planning and making our trip to Ohio.

Educating ourselves

We spent the first couple of weeks entirely just educating ourselves about the voting process in Ohio. Of course, we still have much to learn so the education efforts are ongoing!

A lot of the basic facts and timelines are available via the Ohio Secretary of State’s web site, specifically the Elections and Voting in Ohio section. We skimmed through the sections initially to get the general picture. Since then we’ve been using it more as a reference guide for specific topics and deadlines. There are also similar web sites for the Board of Elections available at the county level.

Tiffany found NOVOC, which is a coalition of statewide organizations advocating for “voting rights, election protection, informed voting, voter support and community empowerment.” We figured this would be a good entry point to learn about GOTV activity in Ohio.

We signed up with NOVOC and started attending their meetings. Our first meeting was on August 25, where we learnt about National Week of Voter Registration (September 20–26). This was a 55-person meeting and we were the informational babies of the group so we were eager to listen in, take notes, and just absorb as much as we could!

Our main takeaways from this meeting were:

• NOVOC is an umbrella body, not directly hosting GOTV events itself. It is comprised of regional organizations (e.g. AkronVotes), special-interest groups (e.g. League of Women Voters of Ohio), and functional area committees (e.g. for voters with transportation needs, for voters with disabilities, etc.).
• GOTV events are hosted by individuals or smaller groups affiliated with either the regional organizations or special-interest groups mentioned earlier. The regional organizations and special-interest groups support event organizers with GOTV informational resources, swag, do’s-and-dont’s guidelines, and sometimes mini-grants funded via NOVOC.
• The regional organizations are focussed on urban metro areas, e.g. Dayton, Cleveland, Akron. Each regional organization had its own recurring meeting which is expectedly more focussed on activities in that region. Since Tiffany and I wanted to focus our efforts on specific counties and underrepresented populations within those counties, we made note of the relevant regional liaisons in the meeting so we could reach out to them later. We also figured the regional meetings would be smaller in size and, as such, afford us more opportunities to ask more specific questions.
• There’s a cross-section of very well-informed attendees at this meeting. There were representatives from the USPS, the ACLU, and the Ohio Board of Elections to name a few. And, of course, there were regular but experienced citizens who’d been volunteering with NOVOC or one of its sub-groups for the past several election cycles.

The same evening we attended a regional meeting for the Dayton area (Montgomery county). As expected, the meeting was smaller and more focussed on specific events happening in the area as well as virtual or “at home” events but targeting citizens of the the Dayton metro area. Being only our second GOTV-related meeting, we were still primarily in listening and note-taking mode. Rather than interrupt regional meetings with our very-specific and very-newbie questions we figured we’d email them later to the regional group organizers or try to Zoom with them if it suited their convenience.

Over the next week we did get in touch with regional organizers and had our questions answered. We also attended a couple more meetings, notably for the Dayton, Akron, and Cleveland regions. We were definitely starting to feel more confident in our knowledge of how the GOTV effort was organized across Ohio, who our main points of contact would be, and how we could start getting actively involved by volunteering for events.

At this point we started a new calendar shared between Tiffany and me. We use this to keep track of the various meetings, educational webinars, and GOTV events that we plan to attend.

Finally we also found NOVOC’s YouTube channel which has some excellent educational content. New videos are added multiple times a week!

Planning and making our trip to Ohio

Whilst attending GOTV meetings, reading up on/watching videos of educational resources, and, of course, working our full-time jobs, we were also planning our trip from California to Ohio. Thankfully, having made this trip just a few months prior, we were able to work off a template.

We informed our neighbors of our trip and the motivation behind it. They were very eager and delighted to help keep an eye on the house, collect our mail/packages from time to time, and try to keep our house plants alive.

We checked our inflatable mattress, found a leak in it, and patched it with my bicycle patch kit. Even though we’d be staying overnight in hotels this time we still liked the idea of having a flat and soft surface where the non-driver (and our dog, Seger) could rest and maybe catch some zzzs.

We mapped out our road trip (so easy these days compared to 20 years ago!), found pet-friendly hotels not too far off I-80 to stay in, and booked them.

Finally, I took the eve of our departure off from work. This turned out to be a wise decision. I was able to pack our car 95% of the way with no stress at all. I got our car’s oil changed and fluids topped up. I also managed to find time to squeeze in one final evening of tennis before I took a prolonged hiatus from it. To explain my sudden impending absence from near-daily tennis matches, I said my goodbyes to my tennis buddies, transferred my Sunday morning group play organization responsibilities to others, and temporarily put my club membership on hold.

As we did last time around, we left moderately early in the morning (around 8 AM). Our first stop was just 15 minutes away — at the local park, where we could tire out Seger so he would be less grumpy during the day-long drive in the car. After that, we set our GPS for our first overnight stop: the Best Western Dunmar Inn in Evanston, Wyoming. Twelve hours of driving, three state border crossings, and a handful of rest stops later, we arrived at the motel at around 9:30 PM local time. For extra precaution Tiffany sanitized room surfaces while I took Seger out to do his business. We moved our hotel bags, Seger’s food, and own pillows in; refrigerated some perishable snacks; fed Seger; and passed out soon after.

The second day’s drive was scheduled to be a bit longer so we started the day a bit earlier. After traversing most of Wyoming and most of Nebraska we made camp a few miles south of I-80 in Lincoln, Nebraska. The same check in routines as the previous night ensued, except our hotel room was on the 2nd floor so we had to lug our stuff up a flight of stairs (we deliberately avoided the elevator owing to COVID).

The final day’s drive was through a very windy Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and finally Ohio. We arrived at Tiffany’s childhood home around 10 PM at night. Tiffany’s dad and brother had already prepared our room for us so we pretty much just unloaded the essentials from the car and crashed. We had all of Labor Day to unpack the rest of the car, do some laundry, setup our work areas, and generally get more settled in.

What’s next?

Now that we’re in Ohio and also feel reasonably well-informed about the voting process as well as GOTV activities, we’re ready to start actually volunteering at GOTV events. Through the various meetings and web resources, we’ve learnt that there are a few different types of GOTV events targeting Ohio citizens where we could volunteer our help.

Voter registration drives

These are events where we’d show up in person — with necessary COVID safety measures in place— and help citizens register to vote, check their registration status, help registered voters apply to vote by mail, track their application status, or just answer citizens’ questions about the voting process in general AMA-style.

Since Tiffany and I want to target underrepresented communities, we’ll be volunteering primarily at registration drive events that are tied to food shelter events, church or temple food giveaway events, or otherwise organized in inner-city urban areas (e.g. the first of these events that I’ll be volunteering at is this afternoon at the Goodwill Outlet in Akron).

Phone and text banking parties

These are events where volunteers can stay home, download the necessary software, get trained on it (during a separate pre-requisite event), and then start reaching out to citizens via phone calls or text messages. For a sense of camaraderie and mutual support volunteers will get on a Zoom call together during these events.

Each event is usually targeted to a specific demographic — e.g. friends and family, likely but unregistered voters, college kids, etc. — so the message may be effectively and efficiently tailored to these groups.

In all honesty, neither Tiffany nor I are very comfortable with this type of activity, having been on the receiving end of many phone calls and text messages requesting political donations. However, we’ve been informed by those more experienced than us that people are more receptive to GOTV messaging since it is non-partisan. We’re going to give this an earnest shot and see how it goes!

Postcard and letter mailings

These aren’t group events like the ones mentioned earlier. A regional or special-interest group organizer will mail volunteers a set of postcards and a set of talking points or a script. Also included is a list of recipients, typically conforming to a specific target demographic, e.g. likely but undecided voters in a specific geographical area. Volunteers must hand write postcards following the talking points/script, address them to each recipient, and then send them out. For letter mailings, https://votefwd.org/ is the place to get started.

In the days since Labor Day we’ve attended a few more meetings and started RSVPing as volunteers for events in the coming weeks. As I mentioned earlier, the first event is today afternoon — an in-person Voter Registration Drive at the Goodwill Outlet store in nearby Akron. There are a couple more in-person events (Dayton and Cleveland areas) we’ll be volunteering at over the coming weekend.

Next week we’ll be volunteering for a few more in-person events (Dayton and Akron areas) some informational webinars (still much to learn!), a training for phone banking, followed by a couple of phone banking events. We try to keep it light during weekdays since we have our full-time jobs as well. Still, I’ve taken the coming Wednesday off since there are a couple of in-person events that day and also just to catch my breath mid-week.

The week after is National Week of Voter Registration so there will be a massive uptick in GOTV activity compared to prior weeks. So far I’ve taken two days off work already and will quite likely take another. It’s the only way I can do justice to my work and GOTV activities both!

Beyond that, things are less clear at the moment. We haven’t seen too many in-person GOTV events scheduled in October yet, possibly because the deadline for registering to vote is October 5. We suspect all organizers are simply focussed right now on National Week of Voter Registration events and just haven’t started scheduling events beyond that yet. We hope to know more in the coming couple of weeks.