• This election could make possible another Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia to serve on the Supreme Court. There could be two, three, or more appointments in the next few years.
• This election could determine whether school vouchers will wreak havoc with public schools and deprive thousands of low and moderate income students of meaningful education opportunities.
• This election could determine whether we lift millions upward from the doldrums of poverty by raising the minimum wage.
• This election could determine whether we dismantle all affirmative action efforts to expand economic and educational opportunities for minorities and women.
• This election could determine whether we continue to spare lives and spend funds desperately needed for education, health care and economic programs on wars.
• This election will set the tone for equity, fairness, and justice for the new century.

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The basic strategies for preventing voters from exercising their franchise - intimidation, deception, and challenging a voter's eligibility through laws designed to facilitate disenfranchisement.  Do not let any intimidated you from casting your ballot.  If you or anyone you know experiences any of the following please contact Advancement Project.

Intimidating voters takes many forms from videotaping or asking inappropriate questions of voters in a polling place, to placing heavily armed police outside poll sites, and distributing threatening flyers announcing the penalties for voting fraud.  The intention is to make voting actually or apparently risky in order to keep people away from the polls.  Voter intimidation is illegal under federal law, and many states' laws as well.  However, most laws are not clear on what constitutes intimidation and there is a need for clearly articulated standards at the state level to make sure that these laws cover all of the techniques used to threaten voters. 

The following all meets the definition of voter intimidation:

• Deceptive Practices:  Voter deception involves using disinformation campaigns to prevent targeted populations from voting.  This usually involves publicizing bogus restrictions on who can vote and what the voting procedures are.  In some instances the perpetrators prevent registration or make people believe they aren't registered when they are, and in others they use misinformation to prevent registered voters from going to the polls.
• Caging:  Caging is the practice of sending non-forwardable mail to voters and challenging the eligibility of every person for whom the mail is returned as undeliverable.  The mailings are targeted to members of one party and often to minority communities.  The existence of undeliverable mail is, of course, no evidence that a voter isn't eligible and the people engaging in caging know that, but they disingenuously claim to the media that it represents evidence of large scale voter fraud.
• Lack of Poll Site Resources:  In recent elections it has not been rare to see long lines at some polling places while neighboring precincts accommodate all voters easily.  These lines are the result of choices in how many voting machines or ballots are distributed to each polling place, and these choices sometimes have the effect of disproportionately reducing the vote in minority or low income communities.
• Registration Drive Restrictions:  As a response to successful efforts by non-partisan and progressive organizations to register hundreds of thousands of new voters in recent years, many states are enacting restrictions on voter registration drives.  These laws have a discriminatory effect as African Americans and members of Spanish speaking households are twice as likely to be registered through a voter registration drive than whites or members of English speaking households.
• Requiring Voter ID:  Several states have passed laws requiring identification to vote.  The laws have been sold as a solution to voter fraud.  These laws are not intended to prevent in-person voter fraud, of which there is almost no evidence, but are truly designed for the simple purpose of suppressing the vote of groups less likely to have or be able to obtain the required ID - the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and racial and ethnic minorities.  The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that, in Missouri, 238,000 adults lack the ID required by the proposed photo ID law.  This is over 5% of the state's population.  In this year's presidential primary in Indiana a dozen nuns and unknown numbers of students couldn't vote because they lacked the requisite Indiana or federal government issued photo ID.
• No Match. No Vote. Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) one of the new requirements is that identifying numbers must now be associated with each new voter registration record. But nothing in HAVA requires states to reject applications of eligible voters because of technical errors or omissions that do not affect their eligibility. However, many states have refused to register a large percentage of otherwise eligible registrants based on the state's purported inability to verify the applicant's identifying number (i.e. the driver's license number, social security number, or state identification card number.)

These matching requirements have been causing problems for many eligible voters.  For example, a citizen registering as "William" might not "match" if his driver's license is issued under "Bill"; a woman's married name might not match against an outdated database containing her maiden name. Moreover, matching an applicant's registration number with information in a database is an error prone and unreliable process, as both human and computer errors are endemic in the inputting, maintaining, transferring, storing, and matching of data.  For example, a study by Abt Associates determined that in a Florida social services database, as many as 26 percent of the records included city names spelled incorrectly, including forty different spellings of Fort Lauderdale.   

Poll workers have been called the "champions of democracy." They are the last defense between a well-run democracy and an unstable, ineffective political system. The United States Election Assistance Commission estimates that two million poll workers are needed to run a national election. Election officials across the nation are struggling to recruit sufficient numbers of poll workers and to train them adequately.

Advancement Project is committed both to arming voters with knowledge to protect them at the polls and to finding ways to hold election officials accountable to the voters for how they manage their respective polling places. We have developed poll worker palm cards for several to serve as a quick reference of common problems that poll workers face on Election Day.

Contact your county election office and volunteer today to be a poll worker on Election Day.

Click here to find your election office.

Click here to download Advancement Project's Poll Worker Palm Cards.

Click here to find out the requirements to become a poll worker in your state.

Click here to visit Pollworkers for Democracy for to learn more about the important role of pollworkers and how to sign up.