Democracy North Carolina, a group that works to enhance participation in elections and diminish the role of special interests, has experienced a recent defeat in Raleigh with the General Assembly closing shop for the year without passing a publicly owned elections bill. The sting of that loss is mitigated by the fact that the organization has multiple fronts in the battle to get more citizens engaged in democracy.
Linda Sutton, field organizer for the Triad, facilitated a meeting at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant tonight for roughly 18 activists, ranging from a high school student to an 85-year-old activist. Among the topics discussed in the meeting were voter registration, focusing on high schools, voter education, get-out-the vote efforts and candidate forums. While it was difficult to discern a unified strategy from the multiple strands of commentary, Sutton offered her organization’s expertise to any of the handful of organizations that wanted to undertake grassroots initiatives.
A woman who identified herself as a member of the Spirit of the Sit-In Movement Initiative said one of her group’s goals is to collectively hold 2,000 conversations with residents, using the encounters as a springboard to register people to vote.
“We will be more than happy to come and give you that training,” Sutton said. “We would love to do that.”
The Spirit of the Sit-In Movement Initiative’s slate of issues such as turmoil in the police department and the White Street Landfill are largely related to the city of Greensboro, and the group’s voter registration efforts are geared towards influencing the outcome of next year’s municipal elections. Many of those in attendance tonight were likewise looking to the long haul instead of the immediate term of this fall’s elections. Voters in Greensboro have a crowded slate of candidates from US Senate down to state legislative and county commission to choose from, but in many races the focus is on raising money rather than engaging voters on the issues.
(Somewhat ironically, while Democracy North Carolina tapped into Greensboro's activist seedbed tonight, the real local election action this year is in Guilford County's other city, High Point, where municipal elections are scheduled for even years.)
“Right now, it costs too much to run for office at any level,” said Molly Beacham, director of development for Democracy North Carolina. “We need to attract the best and brightest. Some people don’t want to jump that hurdle, or don’t care to.”
Where exactly to goose the civic collective to get the highest level of participation was a matter of debate.
Sutton has been emphasizing reaching out to high school students to educate them about voting and make sure they register when they turn 18.
Others were thinking about college students.
“Obama did a great job about getting them out,” said Nick DiVitci, a Democratic consultant, who worked on John Parks county commission campaign in 2008, and managed Joel Landau’s unsuccessful bid for Greensboro City Council last year. “You have to get them to vote three times, then you don’t have to worry about them anymore; they’re regular voters. At UNCG, there were 18 votes in the last election. There’s a polling place right in the middle of campus. In Obama’s election, there were 2,800 votes.”
In 2008, the League of Women Voters of the Piedmont Triad, went into the Guilford County Jail and registered pre-trial detainees. That’s only one area of weakness in voter registration, said Rebecca Klase, a political science professor at Greensboro College who is active with the league.
“There’s [also] a need for more voter registration drives at workplaces,” she said. “Being a right-to-work state, we don’t have unions registering people to vote as much. I went out to some places like American Express and Kay Chemical near the airport, and some places I didn’t even know existed. These are people working second and third shift, leading challenging lives, maybe caring for a child during the day, so it’s important to let them know that there are alternative times they can vote.”
Pearl Berlin, an 85-year-old woman who dates her activism back to a United Auto Workers labor campaign in 1949, expressed the view that Democracy North Carolina should find out the precinct of every person in the room, and draft them to organize a precinct committee and go door-to-door to get people to the polls.
Sutton said Democracy North Carolina launched a trial project in Winston-Salem to organize a precinct street by street, with mixed results, but it required significant volunteer hours.
“I think we have to talk beyond voter registration,” Berlin said. “Look at the number of registered voters and actual turnout. The discrepancy is a disgrace. What can Democracy North Carolina or someone else do to get the voters on their feet?”
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