One of the bits of activism I've been doing is "postcards to voters,", in which volunteers em>hand-write postcards to strangers; if writing hurts your hand, you probably shouldn't be doing this one. Also, you'd be paying for stamps and postcards, but the minimum commitment is only four cards.
The idea behind this is that a hand-written postcard from a stranger, with reasons to vote for a specific candidate, will be effective some of the time. Each postcard urges the recipient to vote for a specific candidate (e.g., Stacey Abrams for governor of Georgia), reminds the recipient when election day is, and has one other mandatory talking point. For one candidate, the mandatory talking points include "An election can sometimes turn on a single vote—make it yours." They also give a long list of optional content, if you have room on the postcard, ranging from campaign promises to "thank you for being a voter." There's some room for paraphrasing, but they're asking us to stick to the campaign's messages.
I've been writing things like "promises to fully fund public schools" and "will expand Medicaid to provide job and rescue rural hospitals" on the postcar (The cards are all going to registered Democrats, if that matters to you.)
This is oddly anonymous: you the writer are given addresses but not names, and above the address, instead of a name, write something neutral [sic] but encouraging, like "Concerned Citizen" or "Valued Voter." There's no return address. and the signature should be a first name or initials: so, I sign them "Vicki," "Vicki R.," or "VR" (and there's nothing stopping me from signing them "Victor" or "Natasha if I wanted).
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rydra_wong suggested I write this up after I mentioned it in a comment; I'm posting this to my own journal and to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisfinecrew.
The idea behind this is that a hand-written postcard from a stranger, with reasons to vote for a specific candidate, will be effective some of the time. Each postcard urges the recipient to vote for a specific candidate (e.g., Stacey Abrams for governor of Georgia), reminds the recipient when election day is, and has one other mandatory talking point. For one candidate, the mandatory talking points include "An election can sometimes turn on a single vote—make it yours." They also give a long list of optional content, if you have room on the postcard, ranging from campaign promises to "thank you for being a voter." There's some room for paraphrasing, but they're asking us to stick to the campaign's messages.
I've been writing things like "promises to fully fund public schools" and "will expand Medicaid to provide job and rescue rural hospitals" on the postcar (The cards are all going to registered Democrats, if that matters to you.)
This is oddly anonymous: you the writer are given addresses but not names, and above the address, instead of a name, write something neutral [sic] but encouraging, like "Concerned Citizen" or "Valued Voter." There's no return address. and the signature should be a first name or initials: so, I sign them "Vicki," "Vicki R.," or "VR" (and there's nothing stopping me from signing them "Victor" or "Natasha if I wanted).
rydra_wong suggested I write this up after I mentioned it in a comment; I'm posting this to my own journal and to thisfinecrew.Tags:
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I recognize that I'm under a lot of stress and probably not in my right mind. But depending on the random voter, I might not be alone. I don't know. I think it's important to mention, because red states feel different from blue ones...I had forgotten how much.
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I'm also doing some "dear $name, please vote on election day. I'm not asking you to vote for a specific candidate, just to be a voter" letters. Those are addressed to people by name (not "Tennessee Voter" or such), and signed, but on those I have the person's name and address and they have only my hard-to-decipher signature.
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We didn't do the phone-banking part of the plan, because there was a problem with the [security whatchamacallit] such that we could not get the list of phone numbers. I remember being unhappy that they had to keep it so secure, but it was just a general "this is why we can't have nice things" kind of unhappy. Disclosing contact information has been weaponized. You can't just make a list of such things about your allies, and leave it lying around where your enemies might see it!
Yes, I expect a competent hacker could have acquired the list of addresses in ten minutes if they were half trying. It's like they were inside a locked car, and we were faffing around trying to find the driver who had walked off with the key. I might shake my head sadly about the fact that hardly anybody leaves their cars unlocked these days, but I'm not going to break the window.
For postcards, we had voters' names and addresses. Not "Dear Voter," but "Dear Anne," and the address was firstname lastname/street...They told us not to put return addresses, which makes sense if you don't want them to object to us poking our yankee noses into their local business. But they also told us not to sign with our full names. We are not supposed to be identifiable. Contact information has been weaponized. Do not give it to a potential enemy. I don't know how specific the PA voter list was. It might have been GOTV for Democrats only. It might have been asking all voters to vote for thus-and-so, telling them he's a great guy who will save their schools and health care and parks.
The lack of reciprocity made me a little uneasy. We have their contact information and they don't have ours. But...I was sitting there in Cambridge, as a peaceable person And I was reaching out to strangers in Pennsylvania who might not share my values. I don't mean they might not give a fuck about protecting health care access--I mean they might be violent misogynists or something. I think that's part of the reason the umbrella organizations like postcardstovoters.org or sisterdistrict.com only give out handfuls of addresses at a time, rather than publicizing big long lists.
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My signature isn't terribly identifying at this point, but that's not deliberate obfuscation: it's the result of 40-odd years of signing the same name, that went through a stage of being told that it was less important that my signature be readable than that it be hard to forge. (At this point I am not sure it's either.) I could slow down and write my name instead of the cursive scrawl, I guess. Conversely, if I was actually worried about someone knowing who was sending those first-name-only postcards, I'd want to sign with a given name other than my own.
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