Reclaim our Vote with Andrea Miller
About This Episode
We’re exploring the work of the Center for Common Ground this week with founding board member, Andrea Miller. When it comes to racial justice and equity, she’s an incredible fighter, a noted leader in Virginia working to turn the tide on compressed voter access, and a firebrand when it comes to elected leaders working against the will of the people of her state.
With the Reclaim our Vote campaign, the Center for Common Ground demonstrates their incredible focus:
Eligible voters of color are being purged from voter rolls at a much higher rate than white voters. People in minority communities were already struggling to reach the voting booth in voter-suppression states, due to the implementation of strict new voter ID laws, a reduction in polling places and/or early voting days, and many other tactics
Andrea tells us how Reclaim Our Vote is working to expand their volunteer base across for key states specifically, and more nationally. She outlines the tools and techniques her organization is counting on to spread the world of voter disenfranchisement, calling on all of us to gear up, get out, and vote.
Links & Notes
About Andrea Miller
Andrea Miller is Founding Board Member, Executive Director, People Demanding Action, Founding President, National Women’s Political Caucus of Virginia, Founding Tri-Chair Virginia Poor People’s Campaign and a member of the Democracy and Governance working group of the Virginia Green New Deal. Andrea is an IT and Political Director, a digital and elections strategist. She designs and administers digital phonebanks and texting programs. From 2013 to 2015 she led the Progressive Round Table on Capitol Hill bringing together members of Congress, activists and non-profit leaders. Her expertise is in voting rights, climate and the Equal Rights Amendment. She has successfully advocated for legislation on both the Federal and State level. In 2008 she was the Democratic nominee for the Virginia 4th Congressional district.
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Carrie Fox:
Welcome to Mission Forward, a podcast exploring how big ideas in social change take hold. My name is Carrie Fox, and I'm your host.
Carrie Fox:
Listen in, as we talk with innovative thinkers, makers, and doers in social change, and we explore how foundations, philanthropists, and corporate and community leaders are challenging business as usual, in order to move missions forward, in meaningful and memorable ways.
Carrie Fox:
We're talking voter suppression with Andrea Miller, founding board member of Center For Common Ground. And I can think of few more important topics as we near Election Day.
Carrie Fox:
Andrea, I am so honored to be talking with you today. I want you to tell me first a little bit about the Center For Common Ground, and your powerful Reclaim The Vote campaign.
Andrea Miller:
Thank you so very much for inviting me to join you, Carrie, and your listeners. Center For Common Ground is a relatively new endeavor for us.
Andrea Miller:
We founded the 501(c)3 in 2018, because we had worked on elections since 2016, and in 2017. And we realized, not only did we love working with underrepresented voters, which is the term we use for black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American voters, but we were also pretty darn good at it.
Andrea Miller:
So when we founded Center For Common Ground, what we realized was, we did want to continue doing the voter work, because when we look at the numbers, the number of people being dumped off the rolls wasn't going down. If anything, it was going up.
Andrea Miller:
We ended up creating our campaign, Reclaim Our Vote, because, when we were analyzing those numbers, we realized that, in many elections that were barely closed, what was missing was the underrepresented vote. So we decided, that, as progressive people, as people very, very interested in economic and social justice, that if we added the missing underrepresented voters' vote to our vote, that would allow us to reclaim our vote.
Andrea Miller:
That's why we didn't name the campaign, Reclaim Their Vote. There's really an our. We are all in this together.
Carrie Fox:
I had a chance to hear you speak a few weeks ago, as part of a We The Change webinar called Crushing Voter Suppression, and your voice has been in the back of my mind ever since. There's a few things, quite a few things, actually, you said, that really have stuck with me, and moved me and my team, to action now, in support of Reclaim Our Vote.
Carrie Fox:
One thing I want to really dig into today, and it's this idea that in the United States, the right to vote is the only right you can lose if you don't use it. Not enough people truly understand this, but thanks in large part to your efforts, that truth is becoming more clear. And just as you just touched on, that states have figured out how to stop black, brown, Hispanic, Asian-American and young people from voting.
Carrie Fox:
What do you see when you're looking at American politics today, and thinking, "Gosh, are we moving in the right direction? Is this campaign going to help us move in the right direction, as we are coming into the most important election of our lifetimes?"
Andrea Miller:
I love that question. And the first thing I want to deconstruct is the notion that in America, we have a right to vote. We don't. In America, voting has always been, and still is, a privilege. When this country was founded, the ability to vote or the right to vote, was given to rich property owning white men. If you didn't own property, you weren't voting.
Andrea Miller:
If you weren't a man, you weren't voting. Women didn't get the "right" to vote, I'm going to say, the ability to vote, until 1920. And if you were black, you really weren't voting.
Andrea Miller:
That should help people understand, that since voting isn't a right, then states, who actually control the mechanisms of voting, have been very quick and very skillful at figuring out how to take away people's ability to vote. The thing that so many people, well, actually that most people don't realize, is that when you register to vote, you are not guaranteed that you will be registered for the rest of your life when you register to vote.
Andrea Miller:
If you do not consistently vote, you will lose your ability to vote. No one explained that to you when you registered to vote. No one says, "Thank you for registering to vote. Now make sure you vote. Because if you miss a certain number of elections, we are going to dump you off the roll." That is a fact. That is our truth.
Carrie Fox:
That's powerful. And so, so much a call to arms and call to action, as we are sitting here, right? This is going to be airing at the end of September, and we need to get everyone to hear this message, and act on it.
Carrie Fox:
Now, I'm thinking, one not need look very hard to find an example of voter suppression. They are there all throughout American history. We are going to find them, without much searching.
Carrie Fox:
But I've got on my mind these days, Stacey Abrams, and thinking back to her gubernatorial race of 2018, thinking to those five- and six-hour-long voting lines, for people to get to the front to say, "You've already voted," or, "You're not eligible to vote." And clearly we know the way that that race turned out.
Carrie Fox:
But we also know that this is not about one race, it's not about one state, it's prevalent across the entire country. So I'm curious what you're seeing, as we inch closer to this election, where are voters most vulnerable to voter suppression, and what can we do about it?
Andrea Miller:
Well, we have seen, in the primaries, we have seen voters in Milwaukee, where more than a hundred polling locations were suddenly reduced to five. We have seen voters in Georgia, who do dutifully requested their vote by mail ballot, and then never got them.
Andrea Miller:
We have seen North Carolina say, even in spite of COVID, "Well, in order to vote by mail, all students are 'eligible' to vote by mail, all voting age citizens, all registered voters. However, we are going to require two witnesses."
Andrea Miller:
And so, because of COVID, they said, "Well, okay, we're going to require one witness." My concern is always for that older, living alone rural voter. Where are they going to get a witness? Who is going to witness their signature? So that means they are going to need to go to the polls and vote.
Andrea Miller:
The other issue in North Carolina is, and we've actually seen this in Georgia, we've seen it in Texas, we've seen it in so many states where we work, that community of color voters fill out the form, they actually get the ballot. And then, all the noise about the Post Office, they won't put the ballot in the mail.
Andrea Miller:
And now, we have the problem of, what do we do with a vote by mail ballot, that now, there really isn't time to mail it? All these different states have different rules about what you can do with that ballot.
Andrea Miller:
In North Carolina, voters can actually drop the ballot during early voting, but they're going to have to sign. And in North Carolina, only the voter, or an immediate family member or someone that has been given written authority, can drop off that ballot.
Andrea Miller:
The rules vary state to state. You almost need a law degree to figure out what you can and what you can't do, in some states. We lost 558,000 ballots in the primary, because voters made a very, very simple mistake, or were actually cheated, and their ballot wasn't counted.
Carrie Fox:
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Carrie Fox:
You all have put together a really powerful campaign, that has made it easy for individuals, including ever individual listening right now, to take action on this issue. You've been talking about postcards, phone banking, billboarding. I want you to talk to me about some of those tactics. And then, I want us to talk a little bit about how the message is being delivered.
Carrie Fox:
Because, as a communications professional, I have been tracking and watching so carefully the way that you all are sharing messages, and it comes back to where we started today, this importance of shifting power, that I want us to talk about too. But first, let's talk about the tactics, and why those tactics are [inaudible 00:12:23].
Andrea Miller:
We use four tactics. One of them is new in this election, but the other two, we've been using, to some degree, since 2018.
Andrea Miller:
Our oldest tactic that we have been using, actually since 2016, is phone banking. We call voters on the telephone, and we give them information. We call voters to talk to them about voting. We're not selling candidates, we're not selling parties, we don't care who they vote for. We just want to make certain that they will be able to vote.
Andrea Miller:
So when we call voters for, get out the vote, we want to make sure that the voters know where they can vote, when they vote, what ID they need to bring, and do they have a way to get to the polls, and back home? So it is our goal to remove whatever barriers people may have had in voting.
Andrea Miller:
The other thing that we do with our phone calls is, we invite voters who maybe haven't consistently participated in democracy to come back. I describe it to our volunteers as, "Think of a community dance. Everybody knows where the dance is. Everybody knows when to dance. Some people feel like they're just not invited, so they're not going to go."
Andrea Miller:
We're inviting people to come back to that dance of democracy. When we called voters in Georgia for the 2020 June primary, what we found was, you're going to love this number, 82% of the people we call actually showed up and voted. And we leave messages. It didn't matter whether we actually spoke to the voter, or we just left the voter a message. The percentage turnout was identical.
Andrea Miller:
We started postcarding for the very first time in 2019, we sent out about 300,000 postcards. So far, in 2020, we have sent 5.4 million postcards to voters, about voter registration: "Hey, you may no longer be on the voting rolls, please check your voter registration status." And then we help people with how you can check online.
Andrea Miller:
And if online isn't available to you, here's the phone number of your county registrar, give them a call. So we know that the postcards work, because so many county registrars complained about all the phone calls they were getting.
Andrea Miller:
We also designed our own line of culturally empowering postcards, so that when voters saw those postcards, it was like, "Wow, what is this?" And then they would read it, and they would go, "What do you mean, I might not be registered to vote? I want to go check on that."
Andrea Miller:
The other types of postcards we do is, we experimented with pledges to vote this year in North Carolina. And we asked people, "We need you to vote. And not only do we want you to vote, we may need you to help other voters. So share the information we shared with you, make sure your friends, your families, your neighbors know about this. And then, would you be willing to give other voters a ride to the polls?"
Andrea Miller:
Again, remember, we are always very, very concerned about older voters, because in more rural areas, there is no public transportation. And again, public transportation for older voters really isn't safe in these COVID times. Would you be willing to phone bank, would you be willing to [inaudible 00:17:04]?
Andrea Miller:
We got more than 2,000 volunteers in North Carolina, who said, "Yeah, I am willing to step up, and not only am I going to vote, I am going to take action to ensure other people vote."
Andrea Miller:
Another new tactic that we used in 2019, that we are going to use again this year is we used billboards. In 2019, we were working in the North Carolina Third District. That was Congressman Walter Jones's district. He died in office, so they held a special election on September 10th.
Andrea Miller:
When we were calling North Carolina, in order to let voters know there's an election coming up, voters are like, "What do you mean, there's an election? Walter Jones is our Congressman." "No, no, Walter Jones was your Congressman. The gentleman died, so there's going to be another election."
Andrea Miller:
We were, number one, amazed at how many people did not realize there was going to be a special election, because their member of Congress had died. The other issue, if you remember, in late August, early September 2019, we had a hurricane. And that east coast of North Carolina, which is where the Third District is, was heavily impacted.
Andrea Miller:
When we realized voters have no idea there's an election going on, what we did was, and a lot of North Carolina is rural, we bought billboards, billboards that stood, that were, mounted, 17 feet high. They were 20 feet wide. And as you approached that digital lighted billboard, even at night, you could read the message.
Andrea Miller:
We told voters when early voting was, we told voters where early voting was in their county. We gave them the address. We gave them the time it was open. We gave them a website, if they were able to use a website, about where they could go and find out about their candidates.
Andrea Miller:
And we discovered, wow, billboards really do work. Because we had a great turnout for that election that nobody knew was there.
Carrie Fox:
I want to make a shout out there that folks can donate specifically to your billboarding campaign to support those efforts.
Andrea Miller:
Yes, because last year, we ran billboards in one district, in one state. This year, we are running billboard campaigns in each state. So it's going to be a lot bigger than it was last year.
Andrea Miller:
We also have a campus billboard project. There were 125 college campuses that opened. We have billboards on all 125 campus that opened up. And what we're telling our young people, our college age students, Millennials and Gen Zers, currently in 2020 make up 37% of the voting age population, 37%. So we are asking our young people, "Vote your power. You are an incredible, powerful voting bloc."
Andrea Miller:
Everybody thought about the baby boomers and what a powerful voting bloc we are, and were. Well, our Millennials and Gen Zers are about to move into 42% to 47% of the voting bloc in the 2024 election. So we are telling our young people, "Vote your power now. Get ready. Because in four years, it's going to be you," so, billboards.
Andrea Miller:
And then finally, texting. There's this new 21st century paradigm where almost everybody has a cell phone. Well, we tend to not answer numbers that ring on our cell phone that we don't know, but we'll go and immediately look at a text from any number in the universe, whether we have any idea who it is or not.
Andrea Miller:
We built our own custom texting program, so that, for five of the eight states where we work, and we work in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, five of those eight States used vote centers, where normally the only way to figure out where that vote center is, is to go and look it up on the Internet.
Andrea Miller:
If any of our voters say, "Oh, I plan to early vote," we can automatically send them their nearest vote center. It's just automatic. Our texting program looks it up and says, "Here's your closest center."
Andrea Miller:
We give them the date, we give them the time that it's open, because, even though there may be multiple votes standards available in a county, they're not all open on the same date, nor are they all open at the same time.
Andrea Miller:
Again, we want to empower voters, so that all they have to do is say, "I'm going to go vote on this date. Yup, it's open, I know where it is, I know what ID I have to bring, I've got a way to get there. I'm set. I'm vote ready."
Carrie Fox:
You've got another element that you've added into this, I think, in partnership with MSNBC, that it's not just about voting with your power and voting your power, but using your power, See Something, Say Something. I want you to talk to us about that.
Andrea Miller:
Yeah. Well, one of the things that is possibly going to be a new challenge for our community of color voters this year is actual physical intimidation and harassment at the polls. I mean, that has never stopped. There have always been some isolated incidents of it.
Andrea Miller:
Now there's a lot of talk about really encouraging it in communities of color. So See Something, Say Something, will allow a voter using their phone, a Tablet, their computer, when they get home, whatever they have available to them, to go to our website and report an election problem.
Andrea Miller:
They can put in their name. They can put in their e-mail address, phone number. They've been shoot a short video. They can take a picture. And then, when they save it, it automatically posts that onto a map. And we have a nationwide map, where we can see what kind of voting problems are voters recording.
Andrea Miller:
Are they recording intimidation problems? Are they recording, "I went to vote, and they didn't have the right people or issues on my ballot. I went to vote, it was ridiculous, the lines were four hours long." MSNBC will again have See Something, Say Something in their election room, so they will be watching these reports come in, and then we monitor them as well.
Andrea Miller:
There may be some that we see where we will immediately, like for MSNBC, "You're going to want to get a reporter out there right away." And because we have the name and the contact information of the person who reported it, we can get back to the news people right away. So See Something, Say Something, we've enhanced the 2020 version.
Carrie Fox:
You have been fighting to demand action on this issue for a long time. And I am so glad you have, you have made such strides. You and your team have made such strides on this issue. And I know we have a long way to go.
Carrie Fox:
As I think about a comment I heard recently, I'd love to get your take on this, that political historian Michael Beschloss recently commented that we are one year away from losing our democracy. That's not a talking head, that's not a commentator, that's a political historian.
Carrie Fox:
And I'm curious if that's the future you see too, right? We know the stakes are high. Is there any way from coming back from where we are right now?
Andrea Miller:
Yes. I predict, along with Rachel [Bykofer 00:26:24], this will be a banner year for democracy, that voters who had been asleep, who had been thinking, "Eh, everything's okay, I don't need to vote," "Eh, I'm not crazy about either one of the candidates, so I'm going to just stay home," and that's when it happened in 2016.
Andrea Miller:
If we looked at the votes we had for Donald Trump, for Hillary Clinton, the real winner of that election was, "Oh, I don't want either one of these characters." That was the real winner. So, in this election, we are really working to make sure young people know, use your voice, vote your power, you got an opportunity to change.
Andrea Miller:
Why will this be such a possibility for change this year? Because so many people who thought they had it good have learned, "Oh, I didn't have it as good as I thought I did. I don't have my job. And since my health insurance was tied to my job, now, I don't have health insurance for me, my family, and my kids."
Andrea Miller:
So many people, "Oh, I thought I had it good. Well now, my kids can't even go to school." There's a lot of people who live in rural America, I'm one of them, and my Internet just went out. We're like, "Yeah, we live in rural America. We've got a really nice life, but whoa, we don't really add powerful Internet out here. And when the Internet just goes, we're just kind of stuck out here."
Andrea Miller:
There are a lot of people now that are looking at the life they imagined they had, and coming to grips with the life they really have, and they're going, "Oh, this is not good." And we can go down Path A, or we can go down Path B. And more people, probably than any time in US history, are now very starkly aware that Path A leads one place, and Path B lead somewhere else. So I am predicting a banner election.
Andrea Miller:
We will be partying from November 3rd, and we're going to need to get back to work, as Center For Common Ground, on November 6th. Because our first order of business on November 6th will be working to ask the constitutional amendment, really making voting a right, and not a privilege that we have kind of, sort of extended through constitutional amendment.
Carrie Fox:
I support you on that. Every bit of us we'll support you on that. I want you to give us the last line today. We have a lot of work to do.
Carrie Fox:
As we sit in October, where do we go to learn more, to get involved? And where will you be on Election Day?
Andrea Miller:
Ooh, on Election Day? I'm going to answer that question first. On Election Day, I am going to be in my office, booking rides to the polls for voters in Virginia. And I will also be supporting people that will be using our tools, booking rides to the polls for voters in other states.
Andrea Miller:
Right now, to find out more information, and how you can get involved, you can go to our centerforcommonground.org website, and we have a volunteer link there. You can go there. And then I'm going to give you another website. This is a brand new one.
Andrea Miller:
Our new website for the campaign is reclaimourvote.org. You can go to reclaimourvote.org, and read about what we've done, who the amazing people are on our Board of Directors, who make so much of this possible, and just really learn about us, find out how to get involved.
Andrea Miller:
We are doing training every Monday, teaching people how to use our digital phone bank system. We have national phone banks every Tuesday and every Friday. So if you'd feel more comfortable joining a Zoom and phone bank thing in a group, we welcome you.
Andrea Miller:
We've expanded our Zoom rooms, so that one holds 1,000 people, the other one holds 500. This election is make or break for democracy. And we know what side of democracy we're coming down on, and we know what we want to see. So if you are thinking, "An economic and a just society is where I really want to come down," then please join us.
Carrie Fox:
Andrea. I hope at some point, you find that you have an end to your job. My fear is that our job will be in high demand for quite a time, oh, quite a long time. But let's hope that that's different, after November.
Andrea Miller:
Well, we do have a plan. We are going to be rolling out these things in our target states that we call Democracy Centers. And what we're going to do in Democracy Centers is, people who consider themselves not involved in politics, we are going to help them get reinvolved and reengaged with their community. What does your community want?
Andrea Miller:
Because so many communities are hurting. We have an economic plan that they will be able to choose in their community, that they want to do, that we will make sure they understand why there were all these problems voting, and what they are going to need to do to resolve it.
Andrea Miller:
I worked on ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. Well, literally I've got 54 years on that thing, but in the last, oh, 10 years or so, I've worked at the state and federal level. Nevada ratified, Illinois ratified, Virginia ratified, so that gives us 38 States. I'd also been involved working at the federal level to get Congress to remove the deadline. So we worked both strategies at once.
Andrea Miller:
I got a chance, literally, to see how powerful state and federal simultaneous strategies are. We are going to become the progressive allies. We will help people in communities understand, "Here is a really good bill that would help your community. You already know how to win elections. Let's teach you how to advocate to get this bill introduced, and passed."
Andrea Miller:
You can't find people who will support you into passing this bill? Well, like my mother used to say, "Elections are like a Greyhound bus. There will always be another one coming along." In that next election, you're going to need some new candidates. Go elect those new candidates, and then come back with your bill.
Andrea Miller:
That is what Virginia did in 2019. We had people who told us they were going to support us. When we brought our ERA bill to the legislature, they didn't. We took down, not necessarily names, but numbers. How many seats do we need, to show power, and that we mean business?
Andrea Miller:
We needed four seats in the House. We went after 20 seats, we needed four. We won eight. We took control of our Senate, we took control of our House.
Andrea Miller:
You would look at Virginia in 2015, you would have said, "Oh, nothing's ever going to happen in that state. They've got 43 House seats, where no Democrat will even dare to run." Look at us now, baby. Look at us now.
Andrea Miller:
We start early voting, and we never had early voting before, we start early voting on September 18th. We are one of the earliest in the country. We are going to have a parade on September 18th, going, "Look at us now."
Andrea Miller:
Yes, there is hope. It is never so dark that you won't have the ability to succeed at what you want. You need to believe you can do it. And then you need to do the work.
Carrie Fox:
Andrea Miller, with the Center For Common Ground, I so appreciate you giving us some of your time today, and want to thank you for setting a path, you and your team, for setting a path for all of us to follow, and to act on. And I really do mean that.
Carrie Fox:
We will be doing quite a bit, have already started our work postcarding in support of Reclaim Our Vote. And we'll be volunteering at the polls this Election Day, as well, because of how you've inspired and challenged our team. So I want to thank you for that.
Carrie Fox:
I'm going to leave us today with a quote, actually, from Stacey Abrams. "The fundamental power of democracy lies in the right to vote. And if you protect that right, you create possibilities for everything else."
Carrie Fox:
Andrea, it was great to talk with you today. Thank you so much. Stay healthy, stay safe. I look forward to talking with you soon.
