Make a Plan to Vote with our Ballot Drop-off Guides
Filled in the bubbles? Double-checked your ballot? Signed your envelope?
Now take your ballot to a secure drop box near you, support a local business, and explore some local vibes while your at it.
Check out the Vibemap guides to dropping off your ballot in Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.
The importance of making a plan
This election season, we’ve been inspired by all the energy to help people get out and vote. Elected and civic leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams with Fair Fight have been encouraging people to make a plan to vote at VOTE.org. The NBA and other sports leagues are re-purposing sports areas as places to vote. (For example, see our guide to San Francisco.) And local nonprofits and grassroots orgs are running letter writing campaigns like Vote Forward and hosting virtual events that have been helping people to make a plan and vote this Fall.
At Vibemap, we have been participating in many of these efforts ourselves. We love reading voting guides every year. We’re the nerdy ones who create and share a guide to all the voting guides, to compare how group like Voters’s Edge, ACLU National, the League of Women Voters, Let America Vote, Voto Latino, Pissed Off Voters SF, Sierra Club, and others recommend you vote on state and local matters.
Voter guides align with our mission because candidate races and laws impact issues like climate change, healthcare, education, the economy, and racial and gender equality — in short, the well-being of people. It’s been a long time since America’s first election in 1789 — where white property owning men were the only ones allowed to vote. (George Washington, in a landslide.)
So much progress has been made in the arena of WHO can vote. (Happy 100th birthday to the 19th Amendment, in which women won the right to vote!) And yet there’s still more work to do. For a better understanding about WHAT is at stake this election, and for background on proposed laws and local candidates and those at the top of the card, we recommend you visit the nonpartisan Ballotpedia.
Making civic engagement and voting more fun
At Vibemap, we work to support the health of cities and the well-being of communities. Our platform helps people come together and discover things they’ll enjoy in the city, i.e. match their vibe, while doing something new and learning about their local community.
We appreciate people who riff on the wisdom of Elbert Hubbard who said, “Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” Similarly, we’re inspired by the work of Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good and Emergent Strategy, who writes:
“I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves — denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings — increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.”
Voting is essentially a large-scale way of people coming together (whether that be in person or not!) to consider how they want to change their cities for the better. It’s one of our most important civic duties and conduits for making change in our democracy, but that doesn’t mean we need to be self-important about it. We can make a serious responsibility, seriously fun!
Vote Early Guides
One more thing:
If you enjoyed these guides, join Vibemap. We’re group of city explorers discovering and creating good vibes in the city. You can become an early adopter of our free app, or sign up for our weekly newsletter of recommendations that point you towards interesting places and events, or follow us on Instagram.
And send us tips about trends or vibes you’re watching. As we created these city guides to voting, we noticed some trends pop up that we found inspiring:
- In Portland & Multnomah County, Oregon we loved learning that all libraries in the county had created official ballot-drop off stations out of their book return slots.
- We got a kick out of how Seattle & King County located so many of their drop-boxes within beloved parks throughout the city.
- In San Francisco we loved how quickly the Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors transitioned into a ballot drop-off location.
- In Oakland & Alameda County it was amazing to see ballot boxes serving a large geographic area representing each of the city’s unique neighborhoods.
