October 5 Newsletter

Swing Left Greater Boston is teaming up with Commit to Canvass for a trip to Richmond, Virginia. To find out more, join us Sunday 10/6 at 8:00pm and learn why many voters in this recently redistricted area will welcome our assistance.

Virginians go to the polls in less than two months to elect a new state legislature. All 140 seats in the House and Senate are on the ballot, and Democrats need to net gain just two seats in each chamber to take majorities in both.

Virginia is one of the hardest states in which to vote, second only to Mississippi. Virginia’s strict voter ID law and restrictions on early voting disproportionately affect low-income and African American communities. And that’s exactly how Republicans want it. On top of that, Virginia Republicans have purged hundreds of thousands of people from electoral rolls, many of whom are eligible to vote.

If you can’t be there to knock on doors, write letters to Democratic-leaning voters in Virginia! Check the events section above to find a letter-writing party near you. Or donate $15 to Swing Left’s Virginia fund.

Want to learn more about Virginia and specific races? Download the Virginia Primer

Lean Left Vermont, a grassroots organization based in Montpelier, is working with Reclaim Our Vote to contact voters of color in Virginia, asking them to re-register and vote in the upcoming state legislative elections. These citizens have been removed from voter rolls simply because they haven’t voted recently or through other techniques designed to suppress the vote of legitimate voters. Community of color voters are being placed on “Inactive” or “Unregistered” lists at a 16% higher rate than whites.

Lean Lefter Dana Goss is training new volunteers on phone banking with Reclaim Our Vote. She writes:

“Phone banking with ROV is super easy. Most people I’ve trained were not phone bankers (most only wrote postcards), but when presented as a “Register Voters by Phone” action, they were all-in.”

To get started now, go to Lean Left Vermont’s website at LeanLeftVT.org.

After October 15th (the voter registration deadline in Virginia), phone bankers will begin letting registered voters know what to bring with them to vote, where their polling location is, and where and when they can take advantage of early voting.

Dana is available if you have any questions. Contact her at: leanleftcvt@gmail.com

“We’re the Northeast Kingdom, the center of the world, a beautiful 50 miles from the Canadian border. The area may be rural, but it’s amazing how many talented, thoughtful, progressive people are here.”

This is how Barry Lawson (who lives in Peacham, VT, population 732) describes the three counties around him. There, after the 2016 election, he, his wife, two other couples, and several others began to organize a fight for important issues: climate change, refugees, income distribution, and social justice.

As people got on buses to the Women’s Marches in DC and Montpelier, Barry & Co. collected names, creating a mailing list of 160. This formed the original corps of NE Vermont On Guard. As Barry explains, “We’re turning anger into laughter and a sense of we’re in this together.”

The NE Vermont On Guard 2020 Program

After the 2018 election, Barry and his team started what they call their 2020 program: a potluck on the 20th of every month where guests contribute $20. Everyone write letters and postcards, taking advantage of tools and campaigns from Swing Left, Indivisible, Go Left, and other groups.

“We were getting 50-60 people at every potluck. Even now, in this lull period, it’s 25-30,” says Barry. “We eat good food and talk about books, television, whatever’s going on. Then we get to work, doing everything we can to swing the Senate and defeat Trump.”

Need tech help with organizing, attending or contributing to events?

On Wednesday, October 9th at 5pm, Swing Left Greater Boston will be hosting a tech-support call-in and live-stream! Tech Guru Jesse Woelhof will give a brief training presentation on using Google Calendar and Google Drive. Then he’ll be available to take any and all technical questions.

Here’s what Jesse says about the session:

“Not sure about Slack? Slack is really fun and pretty easy! Silly questions about email? I hope to get SwingLeft Volunteers feeling like total email pros.”

Join us by signing up here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/webinar-the-tech-guru-is-in/

Why Technology?

Swing Left is based on the incredible hard work of caring volunteers, and one of the best tools Swing Left has to offer is technology to empower those efforts.

As we ramp up for 2020, we’d like to give you every possible help for using the tech tools available. Anything that empowers our volunteers and organizers makes our movement stronger.