Voter Registration Gears Up!

Helping people register to vote is a primary mission of the League of Women Voters.  LWV ABC is fortunate to have two new leaders stepping forward to help us build our work in this area as we come out of pandemic-mode.

Working with High School Students to
Register New Voters

Julie Trude is LWV ABC’s Vice President, and she’s also taken the lead in working with students in our area high schools, starting with District 11 schools, to register 18 year old’s to vote.  She will be making contact with students in programs that require com-

munity service, like National Honor Society and Key Club, and working with them to find ways to reach students in their schools who will be eligible to vote in the next election. 

Julie’s shown that this will be an effective way to reach students.  By working with a student at Coon Rapids High School, she was able to identify that there would be an opportunity to register students when the graduating seniors came in to pick up their caps and gowns.  In two hours they reached 54 seniors to either register on their phones using the posted QR code, or complete a paper form.  This is a fantastic success!   
​​

Voter Registration – Get out into the Community and help register voters!

LWV-ABC has a new vice-chair for voter registration—Cindy Wetzell (under the Voter Services Committee chaired by Linda Rodgers). What follows is a preview of what volunteering for voter registration might look like going forward.  Thanks to Cindy for this submission to the LWV ABC Newsletter and Blog!

Photo from Sept 2019 LWV ABC Voter

Because the next national election is 18 months away, we have a terrific opportunity to build on our current voter registration outreach before the next huge voter registration push in 2022. This year, in our county, there are currently only three elections on the calendar in November—all for school board seats. However, that shouldn’t stop us from building our network of contacts now in all of the cities that we serve. Our goal is to interact with more of our citizens through community events, church programs, festivals, art fairs and even concerts. And there are likely dozens more ways we can be a presence in the community to register residents to vote. 

That’s where you all come in. We need to share our ideas and our energy. Because not only do we need to find places to go to register voters, we also need to actually go and do that work—to staff a table; to hand out flyers; to help people fill-out their forms either on paper or online; to answer their questions about registering.
 
To help you do that, we will be providing voter registration training later this month. In conjunction with the Minneapolis voter registration coordinator we have put together a training focused on our communities. That training (on Zoom) is scheduled for Saturday, June 12th from 10:30-11:45. The training is less than 90 minutes and will answer all the questions you have about voter registration. The invitation to the training was sent to your email on June 5 through Signup Genius.
 
We are currently working to request tables at several community events that are occurring over the summer. An email with the Signup Genius link will be sent periodically as more events are available to us. If you know of a festival, an art fair, or a community celebration that might be a good opportunity for voter registration, either find out about the possibility of having a table there or forward the information to me and I can check with the organizer. Sometimes, we can staff a table with another organization such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Lions, or another non-profit. I just ask that you keep me in the loop ([email protected]) so that we can keep track of all the events we participate in.
 
When you volunteer to staff a table we will provide you with all of the materials you will need. Usually, there are two volunteers per table. Eventually, we will have at least two (and preferably three) complete kits of materials available in different locations around the county. These kits will include voter registration forms, absentee ballot applications, tablecloth, poster and easel, sanitizing tips, individually wrapped face masks, “I Will Vote” stickers, candy, pens and a 3-ring binder packed with information on voter registration.
 
Please consider volunteering at one (or more!!) events to help register voters in our county! Remember, we will be having a voter registration training on Saturday, June 12th from 10:30-11:45. Watch your email for more information!
 

---