Civic Engagement and the 2020 U.S. Elections

Karen Bonadio:

Good day, everyone. I’m Karen Bonadio, director of alumni relations, and I’m delighted to welcome you to our first Alumni Talk Policy Zoom webinar. The Alumni Talk Policy series features HKS alumni on panel discussions about pressing public issues. While we cannot meet in person, technology allows us to convene virtually, and we appreciate your patience as we navigate this event remotely and apologize in advance for any issues that you may experience. This webinar is being recorded and closed captioning is available and can be turned on at the bottom of your screen.

Today I’m happy to introduce Teresa Acuña MC/MPA 2016, associate director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and HKS Alumni Board member, who will moderate this panel discussion on civic engagement and the U.S. elections. Thank you, Teresa.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you so much, Karen, and welcome, again, to all of our alumni joining us today from around the world for conversation on civic engagement and the 2020 U.S. elections. As Karen mentioned, I am the associate director of democratic governance programs at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, and I have the privilege to work in themes around participation, what does a healthy democracy look like, and I bridge academia and practice of how we actually make a thriving democracy in our country.

As you can imagine, we have a lot of alumni who are contributing to our democracy in a variety of ways, and I’m honored to be joined with the panelists today who are doing their part in making democracy work.

Teresa Acuña:

Please help me welcome Seth Flaxman, great timing Seth, MPP 2011 and co-founder and CEO of Democracy Works; Christina Fletes MPA 2016, voting rights attorney at ACLU of Northern California, welcome Christina. And Ali Khan MPP 2010, co-founder of VoteHealth 2020. Thank you for being here.

So I’m just going to jump right in. The election has started in many states, and I want to start with a question on top of everyone’s mind. How will this election look different from other elections in the past? So I’m going to shoot this over . . . how about Seth, you start us off?

Seth Flaxman:

So, I’m sure all my co-panelists can add, like, five more ways that things are different in this election. It would take a whole hour for us to list everything probably. But one thing that I want to focus on is that voters have more options to vote in this election than they’ve ever had before. At the same time, as they are facing more misinformation, disinformation, and other voter suppression attempts simultaneously. So it’s a really complicated environment for a voter, and my optimistic side, as I think there are enough new options in enough states that we are going to have extremely high turnout this November. Likely the highest turnout in a generation.

Teresa Acuña:

One million people have voted. Battleground states like Arizona start their early voting today, so we’ll see. Ali, how about you tell us, what’s on your radar of how things will look differently?

Ali Khan:

I feel like what we are dealing with so much of is helping people talk through just their fear, right? People have never had more concern about not only will it be safe for me to go to a voting place, or go to the polls, but really all the way down. Right, like, will my ballot be counted if I get an absentee ballot and send this through the mail, right? Will I be able to wait in line without feeling intimidated? Will others protect me and will my vote count? I think particularly when you think about populations that historically have not voted in American elections, so urban, underserved minority communities, lower educational status, they are struggling with how to make sense of not just the question that always rises of does my vote count, but really like how do I even plan logistics? So we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make that as easy as possible.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. Hi Christina. What’s on your radar? How are things going to look different in terms of elections for you?

Christina Fletes:

Yeah. On top of what has already been said, let’s not forget that this year more so than what we’ve seen in recent history, there’s strong call for racial justice after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. People have taken to the streets and lots of people will be taking that energy to the ballot boxes this November. Or now, as early voting has started. And similarly in places like California where I’m from, climate change is impacting the way we vote as wildfires continue to ravage our state and our states across the country, people are being displaced and that means that locations that were going to serve as voting locations may have burned down, or poll workers who have already signed up to work may have left the area, and voters are now concerned about where to get mail if their home has burned down or if they just can’t return yet. So there’s a lot of issues facing this November and we’ve never seen this before, but also a lot of enthusiasm as Seth said. We know that this November, one in 10 eligible voters will be 23 years or younger. There’s a lot of energy for young voters, and I really hope they show up to the ballot boxes this November.

Teresa Acuña:

That’s a great setup. The young voter issue is a great setup for my next question for Seth. The United States ranks 26th out of 32 developed countries in the world in terms of voting participation. What was the problem that TurboVote, the voter registration platform that is a product of Democracy Works, your organization, which I understand was developed at HKS, so we’ll take credit for that. What was that trying to solve?

Seth Flaxman:

I think . . . I’ll give you a little bit of history of it, but also how it applies to this moment and this election. So I am not an apathetic person about voting. I think everyone in this call would be a little bit offended if they were called apathetic if they missed an election. But also everyone on this call has missed an election at least once at some time, and it’s because the process didn’t work for you. I think a lot of great advocates are working on improving the processes of voting. But for me, building TurboVote was like, I can’t wait for that. I need something that can tell me right now, how do I vote in all of my elections no matter what? Just text me the information because I’ll do it. I’m excited to do it. And it came out of my experience of missing three elections when I was at the Kennedy School. For each one, a different process thing that tripped me up. And being in a place where I could sort of dive deep into the numbers and be like, oh my God, like this is a majority of non-voters, or having one out 12 different process issue. We do not have an apathy problem. It’s there, it’s a problem, but it’s not the big share of why folks aren’t participating. It’s because of the . . . people need that assistance to know what do I do to follow this 17th-, 18th- century process. We could go layer and layer and layer on top of . . . . So what that means for this year in particular to give you an example is we now have over 9 million subscribers on TurboVote, hope everyone here should sign up because it . . . folks think of it as like, “Oh, it helps you register,” but really it’s about helping you vote in all of your elections. So even this past week, we sent off one-off notifications to voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Florida about just changing situations in their state about voting. So Arizona now has a new registration deadline, so we’re sending out a text message to hundreds and thousands of voters in Arizona about that new deadline. Or in Pennsylvania we had folks who were signing up to use their state’s . . . in Florida . . . sign up, use their state’s online voter registration site, it was down when they tried. So we could send them a text again being like, “Okay, it’s back up. Finish signing up.”

So getting voters that communication that people need and sort of expect from everything else we do in our online lives and trying to bring that same level of help to people.

Teresa Acuña:

Thanks, Seth. Yeah, a lot of people are surprised when they learn that the U.S. has 50 states plus the territories, that means that we have 50 different ways that we register voters, plus the territories. The lack of uniformity trips a lot of people up, but thanks for that.

Ali, of VoteHealth 2020’s coalition of partners in medicine and civic organizations to work on the health of our democracy, I was surprised to learn that physicians were less likely than the general population to vote. Can you help us understand that?

Ali Khan:

Yeah. And so this is actually sort of a hilarious finding, but it’s pretty longstanding. From the late 1970s onward, we actually know that physicians in general don’t vote as we would expect them to based on their privilege. Based on their income, educational attainment, our years of graduate school debt, you would expect that we would be voting in particularly high numbers. When you control for those factors, pretty good research suggests that we vote actually 9 percent less often than just the general population. And critically for the JDs/MPPs in the room, 22 percent lower than lawyers. So we are really not holding, sort of, our end of the bargain at all.

There’s a few different hypotheses for that. I think one kind of critically . . . it’s sort of like there’s a culture of this primacy of duty to the patient, so whether it’s explicit in terms of you don’t have time off to go and vote, or whether it’s sort of more of a hidden culture of hey, listen, your duty is to be at the bedside or in a hospital or in a clinic, right? Then there is some historical perceptions of well, I should stay here.

I think second is what we know more broadly, again from good research, physicians are actually less civically engaged. So less likely to volunteer in terms of non-patient care related ways with civic or community organizations, and actually much less likely to donate to political campaigns. So the high mark of political donations for physicians actually was 9.4 percent in 2016 of all physicians donating. Which is a big deal when you think about in the ’70s, we were at 2 percent of physicians donating to political campaigns. In general, there just hasn’t been some of that spirit of saying how are we engaging more broadly with the community and with broader civic democracy.

I think third is . . . there is a desire kind of hidden if you think about, we are nonpartisan, so if we are nonpartisan then we should not touch political engagement in any way, shape, or form, even though there’s plenty of work that obviously we know we can do, even in nonpartisan ways.

And then finally, again, do you have the time? The perceived I’m working 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week and then can I even get to a polling place? We have just seen historically lower participation there, overall.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. That leads to my next question for Christina. What does modern voter suppression look like today? A lot of people use the term . . . others have a very serious reaction when we call things voter suppression. Can you help us explain what the nuances around that are?

Christina Fletes:

Yeah. Thank you for that question. I’ll start off by saying that voter suppression exists in the United States. It’s real, and it takes many different forms across the United States, including in places like California, what’s known to be a progressive state.

So for example, barriers to voting. It could be as simple as a voter ID. One calculation puts it at 20 million U.S. citizens do not have a government-issued photo identification. Lots of people may think that voter ID is simply not a big deal, why don’t you have one, why can’t you just present it when you go vote? Well, it costs money to have an ID. It costs money to get to the DMV, for example, and get the ID. It also costs money to get the underlying paperwork that you may need to get that government issued ID, like a passport.

What we see with voter ID, it tends afflict mostly younger and people of color that don’t have access to IDs. And then for vote-by-mail, it depends on the state, but some states have regulations about who can actually vote by mail. In some states it’s dependent on your age, if you have a medical condition. And then in some states, if you’re going to use vote-by-mail, you need to find a notary to witness as you sign your vote-by-mail ballot. So all of these are barriers to voting that are real and that really impact people’s ability to be able to vote.

We also see the shutting down of polling locations across the United States. For some people they may be used to going to the same polling for decades and if their polling place gets moved, that’s a barrier to have to go find information about where that polling location is and then maybe now significantly farther away, and if they don’t have access to a vehicle or they don’t live near a bus route, they may not be able to get to that voting location.

Just last week, we saw that the governor of Texas decided to shut down, we’re only allowed one ballot dropbox location per county. This is a last-minute change that is going to impact, and is already impacting, a lot of voters. It creates more misinformation, it creates an additional barrier to voting in a year when vote-by-mail is extremely important.

And then voter suppression can also take the shape of misinformation. We’ve seen that a lot this year, already. Attacks on the security of vote-by-mail despite very little evidence that fraud is existent and rampant. It’s just simply not. And then there’s also . . . we might say modern voter day suppression, but there’s also remnants from the past that follow us well into today. And that for example, felony disenfranchisement. We see that in Florida in 2018, over 65 percent of voters voted to approve Amendment 4, which would restore voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians with a conviction. Voters wanted this and approved this, yet since then, we’ve seen barrier after barrier preventing people with criminal convictions from voting, whether it be in the shape of having to pay their fines and fees for the courts. That’s a modern day poll tax.

And then in places like California, we also have the legacy of felony disenfranchisement. Currently, there’s over 50 thousand Californians who are on parole, meaning that they have already legally finished their prison sentence, have come home, are paying taxes, are contributing to the community, yet they are not allowed to vote in this November’s election, and hopefully that changes.

And then finally, I just want to point out that not everybody has the equal access to the information they need, and that is a form of voter suppression. If you don’t speak English, as well, you may not have information that you need in a language that you do speak. So the lack of language access. And as well as for voters with disabilities, the lack of accessible voting locations is still an issue in the United States today.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you for that. One of the . . . I know that they were making a lot of efforts to do mail-in voting. A sector of the population that is homeless stands to be really compromised being that there’s not an address where they can receive their ballots. So I know that there has been a lot of advocacy around making sure that we have mail-in ballot access, but also in-person polling location access to voting as well. So thank you for that.

Ali had mentioned a little around the lack of civic culture in the medical profession. And that’s something that, at least at Harvard, we had been thinking about a lot. I’ve had the privilege, and I’m going to do a shameless plug here. I’ve had the privilege to work with a few of our colleagues in founding the Harvard Votes Challenge, which is inspiring or creating a civic culture at the university amongst students, staff, and faculty through voter registration and different types of civic activities.

We use TurboVote and it’s a fantastic tool because we know that students in our community come from all over the country and they might want to vote wherever they’re from, or wherever their permanent address is. And so we have this product embedded, I actually dropped the website in the chat, so I encourage anyone who is an eligible voter, please check it out, and I’ll get to a lot of the other resources that we have on that website.

But this question is for Seth. How can universities, companies, or other organizations be more proactive in cultivating a civic culture in their environment? How can we make places more voter friendly, or perhaps build the excitement for voting?

Seth Flaxman:

My top piece of advice is like being coalition with other colleges, nonprofits, and companies so you are not the first company, college, or nonprofit to tackle this. On the corporate side . . . I’m not sure who exactly the other alumni are who are listening in on this, but assuming you’re at a company, for example, we started the Civic Alliance, along with CAA, to be a place companies could go to get ideas for what they could be doing with their resources. Every company needs to do something, but likely needs to do something different in and around civic engagement. So we wanted to build a coalition that’s about more of network of connecting companies with peer companies that have already done something so they could learn from them. Some of those companies are like bringing hundreds of people to work as co-workers, and giving all their employees . . . or thousands even, tens of thousands . . . giving all their employees a paid day off. Especially if you’re a company with a lot of technical staff, or even you know how to use Zoom well. You should be helping at a polling place on November 3 and bringing those tech literacy skills to help make sure things run smoothly. Others are just helping register their customers, or users, to vote, or blasting out good, accurate election information to all of their employees and customers.

So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the corporate space where I think colleges and nonprofits have been pretty engaged in civic engagement for a while. But on the higher ed front, if you’re very involved in your college, we have around 200 colleges now, actually we just passed that milestone Friday, that work with TurboVote. But we’re a part of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, which is a really powerful coalition that we would encourage folks to get involved in as a way to learn what would work best for your campus, also.

Teresa Acuña:

Awesome. I just want to come back to the point around poll workers. In 2016, over 50 percent of poll workers were over the age of 60 in the U.S. So in the day of Covid, that poses particular challenges of how we’re going to staff up and make sure we ensure the access that we want to give voters.

So if you are of low risk . . . any audience member that might be tuning in, if you are a low-risk individual, I encourage you, again, to visit votechallenge.harvard.edu and you can find resources of how you can sign up to be a poll worker in your community. We need you. Okay. Enough of my shameless plug.

Christina Fletes:

If you speak a language other than English, you’re especially needed to work as a poll worker.

Teresa Acuña:

Yes.

Christina Fletes:

Please sign up.

Teresa Acuña:

Yes. Yes. Thank you for that. There’s definitely a lot of opportunities to serve, and I feel like this is definitely our time, our calling at the moment.

My next question is for Ali. So there’s a few efforts around creating civic spaces out of health spaces. Can you tell us a little bit of why medical professionals are seen as trusted messengers?

Ali Khan:

I think there’s so much good in what Seth just . . . Seth and Christina both commented on that I want to dig into, but I think big picture, right? We step away for a second, thinking about where we’re at right now, Covid-19, I think, even for us as health professionals, as physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, so on, has sort of made it very clear that we can’t afford to ignore the, kind of, very deep connection between civic engagement and how the outcome is. We cannot afford to, kind of, keep our head in the sand, anymore. So what we are seeing is a couple of different trends that are driving the ability for us to set up leverage, that trust . . . .  I want to dig into, in terms of giving people both register to vote but also really protecting their right to vote all the way through to safe voting.

So historically, standing back for a second, the two most trusted professions in American, in society, in the true European data . . . number 1 tends to be nurses across the board. Bob Blendon would tell you the same thing in terms of when you’re thinking about designing a good ad. It used to be nurses and firefighters for a long time. Physician trust has actually been dropping for a number of years, but in this past year, with everything going up from Covid, we shot back up. So we’re number 2 or number 3, depending on the poll, with pharmacists and dentists right after. Why we’re trusted is because people trust us to have their best interest at heart and to give them, sort of, unbiased rational information. Which are huge tools, or leverage, in the context of making the case for why somebody should engage in voting, why somebody should have their vote count, and putting in the work to get to that place. What took us to this point, a lot more work required in some places than others, in this cycle more than any other.

So I think for trying to leverage that as much as possible means that we can take health spaces, which have actually always been able to engage in nonpartisan efforts, through protection through the IRS code, and the National Voter Registration Act, and really say leverage the interest of employers to allow people to get that time off to vote, to enable voter registration on site. To even allow online voting would be secure computers on site in hospitals and clinics in ways that they were never doing before, right?

So at VoteHealth, what we’ve been trying to do is really leverage that energy and that enthusiasm to say health spaces are really unique. They’re safe, they’re open consistently . . .  Right? Usually 24 hours, especially for hospitals . . . they’re reliable. You can find a hospital or a clinic in a poor urban neighborhood or a rural town. But you probably can’t find a grocery store, even a Wal-Mart. So they’re accessible in that way. Then you’ve got that aspect of trust. So there’s a ton of power there, right?

Secondly, there’s downtime. All of us have sat in waiting rooms, right? Or sat in a room waiting for me or a nurse colleague or somebody else to show up and talk to them . . . there’s probably a whole separate lecture on how we should fixing that, and that’s my other day job . . . but point being that you got a lot of time, and we can distill these tools down pretty simple, right? Putting up QR codes in rooms, enabling people to even understand that they have access there.

And critically, I think the third piece is that there’s help available at these places if you need it. For example, the other day, I work in the west side of Chicago, where life expectancy from the population I take care of is 16 years lower than 1.5 miles east in downtown Chicago. A ton of endemic, urban poverty, just decades of structural violence all right there. One of my patients was having trouble in our waiting room figuring out how to use a QR code. I sat down and started working with her on just how to get in the QR code. She revealed she hasn’t voted for anyone since 1996 when she voted for Ross Perot. Now it’s probably unlikely that she and I are going to have the same political views, but I think what health professionals . . . physicians, nurses . . . everyone across the country are really angling on is that we have a fundamental need to protect and advance our patient’s right to vote, no matter what.

So again, the small things that trip people up . . . we got the voter registration done. She wanted an absentee ballot, oh wait, in Illinois, you have to print that out and mail it. So we printed it for her. She didn’t have a stamp, we sent it along. Those small investments over and over again make the difference between whether somebody is going to actually feel supported and engaged in going to vote, or whether they will not do that work. And I think to Seth’s point, again comes the small nudges of did you fill out your absentee ballot, do you need help with figuring out which envelope to submit and where and when and how to sign it. How do we help people with the small pieces? That’s what we’re here for.

I think most critically what we try to focus on is that if we can’t do that ourselves . . . we’ve already done it ourselves, how are we helping the food service workers in the hospital? Or in the HKS cafeteria? How are we helping sanitation staff? How are we helping people who may not have the same level of privilege to get them to vote when they’ve been historically been marginalized even with steady employment or with steady resources. And they can show that we are actually an entire community in that work. Using the safe spaces, Teresa, to your point of health systems, to really advance that cause.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. Hearing Ross Perot’s name after so long was awakening.

Ali Khan:

Me too! Not something you hear all the time in west side Chicago.

Teresa Acuña:

It’s about getting people to exercise their right to vote, regardless of who it is, and thank you for that. On the same thing, right to vote, the legal profession has dedicated and really championed the cause around protecting the right to vote. So my next question is for Christina. You’re an attorney. In what ways has the legal process provided a critical check and balance to the way we vote . . . or perhaps to flip it, maybe been an impediment?

Christina Fletes:

Well, talking on just these last seven months where we’ve been hit by Covid-19, the legal profession has been very, very busy. And I know it hasn’t just been me, but my colleagues across the United States. For example, earlier I talked about Governor Abbott in Texas saying that there would only be one dropbox per county across the entire state. Immediately civil rights groups filed action against that, so right now there are two pending federal cases trying to defeat that form of voter suppression.

And then also since Covid, there’ve been over 300 legal cases across the United States trying to challenge all these new ways, new laws, that the elected officials across the U.S. and other groups are trying to suppress the vote, and Stanford University has a new project called Healthy Elections Project and they have a litigation tracker where you can check out all the lawsuits if you’re inclined to do so. At last count, there was 343 lawsuits, either recently resolved or still spending. And those target anything from the closure of polling places, the issues with the USPS, the lack of language access in some states, the tax on vote-by-mail, there is a plethora of cases going on right now . . . attacking the requirements . . . the notary requirement for people that want to vote by mail.

Then we’re also gearing up to fight on election day, and we hope we won’t have to, but there is the real prospect that there will be voter intimidation or really long lines on election day, or the early days leading up to that, and attorneys are gearing up to protect the vote on election day, either in the form of filing emergency litigation or working the hotlines. And that is definitely another way for people to get involved, attorney or not, there’s ways to work voter hotlines across the United States and there’s also the opportunity to serve as a poll monitor, and make sure that each polling place has all the materials that they need, that there aren’t ridiculously long lines, and that voter suppression and voter intimidation is not happening.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. Christina, just really quick for those that may not know, what is a voter hotline?

Christina Fletes:

So a voter hotline is a phone number that voters can call if they see any issues at their voting location. Or for example, in California in March, one of the servers went down and that caused extremely long lines, so we got a bunch of calls to the hotline saying that, you know, “Election workers are unprepared. They don’t know what to do. People are leaving the line. What should we do?” There could also be calls about electioneering. If somebody is wearing gear supporting the candidate or something on the ballot and is trying to force people or intimidate people to vote in one way or another, that’s another reason you can call the voter hotline. I can chat the national voter hotlines after I’m done speaking so people can be aware that . . . it’s also included in voter information guides. There’s also groups that have . . . local groups that may have their own voter hotlines specific to disability issues or language access issues.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. Yes, that’s the hotline. I’ll move into a few questions that were submitted earlier. The first question is, what measures need to be taken now to educate mail-in absentee voters on how to submit clean, complete, and signed ballots that cannot be discarded . . . excuse me, in the counting process?

Anyone who . . . this is game for anyone. Anyone who has some thoughts around that?

Seth Flaxman:

Yeah, so this is a complicated question because every state has a slightly different process for returning, either by . . . yeah, see they’re called vote-by-mail, or absentee ballots, they have different names for it. The advocacy on this I found is most successful locally because you can have local activists who really get deep in understanding exactly what is going on with their state’s mail ballot and what the cure process is. If there’s a mistake in cure process, we’d then help address that mistake before the election.

So I would encourage anyone on this call to get involved with a state-based organization if they want to work on this . . . . From our perspective, we are thinking through how to do this at scale and it is really challenging. But I’m hoping we can figure out a way for it to educate more voters about their particular rules in their state.

Right now we’re just really urging voters to read the instructions for the first time in their life on their absentee ballots. Because some states you need . . . a small handful need a witness, we’re watching this in South Carolina right now where they reinstituted needing a witness. Christina might soon be able to speak more to that because of the lawsuit nature of it, and there are other states, like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where there’s the issue of the naked ballot, where the ballot has to be inside its privacy envelope in order to be accepted. And signing the ballot in the correct place and the correct number of times with a matching signature to what is on file, is probably the most universal, but even then you are trying to make sure that the signature matches different things on file in different states. Sometimes your registration signature that you registered with 10 years ago, or it’s sometimes the signature you used to apply to vote by mail. So the most important thing is to figure out what’s going on in your state.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you for that. Yes, so I encourage anyone who’s listening, you can check out those particulars on the website of your secretary of state. Organizations like the League of Women Voters, they have state chapters and they provide great resources as well. So I encourage you to check them out.

I’m going to go to our first attendee with a question. Joining us is Ed Fields. Ed, go ahead and ask your question.

Ed Fields:

Thank you so much and thank you all so much for providing this forum. I work in the City of Birmingham and we are really just beginning to engage on a variety of things around election, and I’m just curious to know what resources you all might direct us to on a multiplicity of issues for election day, whether that’s . . . you talked about poll workers, but there’s Covid protocols, there are various aspects of election protection. But the one that I’m walking away with is transportation and how that could be impacted. A lot of our community, where we have a 29 percent poverty rate and folks who probably need help in an incredible way this year. So I look forward to hearing your responses. Thank you.

Teresa Acuña:

That question is for anyone that wants to jump on.

Seth Flaxman:

Ed, I’d be happy to connect more offline, too, to try to connect you to some resources. Each of those needs is really complicated, so it depends on what in particular you’re most trying to do. We are a part of Power the Polls Coalition for poll worker recruitment where we are asking folks to sign up there, and then that becomes a list of volunteers that cities and election officials in particular at the county and town. . . .  But on transportation, this is a really hard one this cycle for all the reasons you mentioned. We are working . . . and I’ll say, this is not that I think is going to solve your problem, so I’m trying to figure out another way to solve it. But we are working with Lyft and Uber to make sure they’re going to be doing their discounted rides to the polls using our polling place location data as a way to power that feature for the day. But it’s still not free like it should be.

I think the third issue you mentioned . . . there was a third issue you mentioned I’m forgetting about, but there are other resources . . . we can try to put you in contact with them.

Ali Khan:

I think the third issue around, sort of, the Covid-19 piece is, and again happy to help as well, we also work with Healthy Voting in terms of being able to tie people to local resources around, how do you vote really safely? Obviously, pieces around for patients that are hospitalized, like applying for emergency absentee ballots, right? So we’re petitioning that way.

I think secondly, we are trying to work with a bunch of our partner organizations at the state level, and even at the county level, around saying what is your state voting plan, right? So can we . . . in addition to transportation, as Seth mentioned, how can we help you with getting a mask? Ensure understanding what social distancing looks like in the line, if that’s what it has to come down to. Hand sanitizer, right? Small packets of wipes to have so that you can feel comfortable. And then really preparing to wait, more than the alt . . . as unfortunate as it is, it means if you’re diabetic, what kind of snacks do you have? Do you have your insulin? Do you have a chair? Or anyone? Some of us who are technologically addicted like I am, do you have a mobile charger? Whatever we need, those small details, there are a number of organizations digging into a lot of those details, so we at VoteHealth would be happy to help it in terms of helping to think about this both from what Alabama has put out there from a state level, but in addition what else we can access from other allied organizations.

Teresa Acuña:

And I’ll just add another critical resource is Know Your Rights information. So I’m going to put in the chat a link to Know Your Rights materials that the ACLU national has created.

Christina Fletes:

That’s awesome.

Ed Fields:

Appreciate y’all.

Teresa Acuña:

And Alabama is not unique in trying to think through these problems. That’s kind of the challenge of how we do elections here. So I’m going to . . . again, if you have a question, please just indicate it by raising your hand and we’ll call on you. The next person that we have in queue is Tom Forrest. Hi Tom.

Tom Forrest:

Great. Please, I have a question that was kind of from the lead-in, something Christina said. And my questions certainly aren’t meant to be argumentative as much as I’m just trying to understand what a couple things she said initially. She mentioned there was a cost of money . . . it cost money to get a voter ID, and my understanding . . . and I just could be ignorant on the situation . . . is I thought voter IDs were free at all states. And when she said it cost money to get a voter ID, and it cost money to get there, that really kind of threw me off because, yes, I understand it may cost money to either take a taxi, a bus, or some other way of getting to a DMV to get your voter ID, it cost money also to go to a grocery store, or go anywhere else, if needed.

And the second thing she mentioned was she said there was no evidence of rampant voter ID fraud, and I understand, and I’m not going to try to prove otherwise; however, how much voter ID fraud is too much? And the reason I ask that question is I’m not talking about hundreds or thousands of voters, but just as much as one. We had a local . . . in Virginia, we actually had a local state assembly race, and a person won by one vote because it went in tied and then they actually had to draw a name out of a hat. And that person went to the state assembly as their representative. So literally it could have been just one vote that could’ve made a difference. So I hear voter ID fraud and things like those, those terms kind of make me wonder what is too much in addition to the cost? So thank you.

Teresa Acuña:

Yeah. Thank you for those questions.

Christina Fletes:

In terms of the voter ID, it’s not free. And sometimes you have to bring a passport . . . I’m sorry, a birth certificate to get your ID. Some people might not have access to their birth certificate, so that’s an additional cost, plus the cost of actually getting the ID. And then it’s very real that for some people a DMV is simply just not as close as a grocery store, so that is an additional cost, and very burdensome to people that are low income. I do think, though, it should be free, and there shouldn’t be cost prohibiting people from having an ID or being able to vote.

In terms of your fraud question, I agree with you, one fraudulent vote is one too many. Just as one person not being able to vote because their vote is being suppressed is one too many. So I think lots of states, I can’t speak to all the states, but I can certainly speak about California, there’s already strong laws in place to . . . against fraud and against double voting. There’s also strong processes to try to catch that in the process. But again, I agree with you that one is one too many.

Tom Forrest:

Great. And just so you know, I think in Virginia it is free to go to the DMV and get a voter ID. So that’s why I figured it was nationwide. Thank you.

Christina Fletes:

Thank you.

Teresa Acuña:

Our next attendee with a question is Karen Aronson. Hi Karen.

Karen Aronson:

Thank you all for doing what you’re doing and for a good session. I have a question and a suggestion and probably aimed at Seth. On the topic of poll workers, the question is really how many places still need them? I started trying to line up colleges and college groups in May and June to get young people out to do . . . to be poll workers, and I ran into a lot of brick walls because I think they still didn’t know what they were doing about their fall semester. But I would suggest that you should go at college alumni groups because young alumni could do it. You should go at college groups like the American Association of Community Colleges, they actually took it up to their board for me, and the board said no. But they cover the whole country, and there are people who live in the areas where they’re registered to vote, they could be poll workers, they’re not far away. And I could go back to them, I suppose, or you could. I just wasn’t clear on how many polls still needed work. And national fraternities and sororities would be another way of reaching out if you could . . . if somebody, I don’t know if you have anyone in your organization who could start tapping . . . you know, where their headquarters and get them to send out . . . not their old ones, but the young members and their young alums. And those would all be ways of sending out the message and revving up people. But how many polls still need workers and how many have lined up enough? Because voting has already started.

Seth Flaxman:

I will say we are talking to a bunch of colleges about this. I do think there’s been some movement where in March colleges didn’t know whether it was a health risk for students. Now that colleges are asking their students to come to campus, I think it seems a little hypocritical to not then ask them to perform the civic duty of being a poll worker because of the health risk of that. But we are seeing some movement there, which is really positive.

In terms of who still needs poll workers, there is no national data on this being tracked live. We put together a model in May that said that we need to recruit up to 500,000 poll workers for this year based on the absenteeism we were seeing in the primaries, and the early primaries projected that into the general. But we are now seeing a huge surge, also in the hundreds of thousands, of people volunteering. I think we’re going to totally crush this challenge as a country, I’m feeling optimistic about it. And I would encourage folks to reach out to their local election official if they want to know what the shortage still is in your area because those are the folks who know most directly. And the closer you get to election day, the more inefficient it is to work through our Power the Polls coalition and the more effective it will be to just go directly to your local election official.

Karen Aronson:

I just didn’t know whether to go back and push alumni groups, for example, if in fact, people are going to go out and say they’re all full. And for MIT election site was tracking poll workers, and I haven’t checked with them recently, but . . .

Seth Flaxman:

Okay. Yeah, I worked on this with . . . I think it’s illegal to name drop other universities on this, but I worked on this with Charles Stuart at MIT, so that Charles is the right person to ask when we put together our model. But the only people who know for certain they have enough are the local election officials. Don’t believe anybody else.

Karen Aronson:

Thank you. Thank you all.

Teresa Acuña:

And to that point, they also need alternates because for a lot of reasons poll workers can back out last minute, or maybe there’s an emergency. So they do keep a list that people who express interest. And one more thing I would recommend, anyone who is reaching out is to stay persistent in reaching out. These local election offices are completely overwhelmed at the moment, and unfortunately a lot of it because they’re trying to figure out a new system in a very critical time. So you may not get a very, very quick response, but please, just stay persistent and just check in with them as much as possible if you don’t hear anything back. A lot of it is just that they haven’t gotten around to it.

So thank you, Karen. Thank you for that question.

Teresa Acuña:

So I’m going to wrap up. We have just a few more minutes together. I’m going to wrap up with some questions that were submitted earlier. If anyone has one last question of our attendees that they want to ask, please let us know by raising your hand.

I’m going to move to the question that was submitted earlier. And we already talked a little bit about this, but maybe we can delve into it a little bit more. The question is which U.S. states or counties have the worst records on voting rights and poll access? Have there been effective efforts to reform these jurisdictions? So Christina, do you want to start?

Christina Fletes:

I cannot give a definitive answer since my mind has been all California this year. But good resources to check on that, the Brandon Centre, ACLU National, and the League of Women Voters. There’s certainly, I can say confidently, there won’t be just one answer, there will be many answers.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you. And in terms of in the California context, which counties do you think have a little more issues in terms of voting rights or poll access in California?

Christina Fletes:

Yeah, in California we’re seeing some concerning things coming out of the central valley counties in California, Orange County there’s significant concerns about voter intimidation this November. Recently, I partnered with a few community-based organizations to push some counties, including Fresno County and San Diego County, to provide more language access to Arabic-speaking voters and Somali-speaking voters, we got to know, even though these communities are very large in these areas and have been there for decades. So that’s only still issues in California and we’re keeping a close eye.

Teresa Acuña:

Awesome. Our last question . . . yes, I’m sorry, did anyone else want to add?

Ali Khan:

No, I would just only . . . I would point to Care Fight, another organization are actually looking at this at a very state-by-state level. Georgia has gotten a lot of attention. Obviously, as Christina mentioned, Texas has gotten a lot of attention here. We saw a lot of shenanigans in Wisconsin earlier in the primary cycle in 2020 in the peak of Covid, and we can imagine this will continue.

Really, I think the challenge is that this is not sort of individual . . . there are, obviously, individual states and jurisdictions that may be more challenging than some, but we are seeing a 50-state strategy around voter suppression. And that is apparent in every single lawsuit, every single court decision, every single case that comes up. So this means that this is not a red-state problem or a blue-state problem, this is a 50-state problem. So there is no action no matter where you live that is unimportant.

Seth Flaxman:

I will say a state that I’m seeing handle the numerous crises around elections this year really well . . . oh, well that’s the state of Colorado. I love that they are mailing every single voter a ballot automatically. They also have automatic registration any time you interact with the DMV. But if for some reason you aren’t registered, or don’t want to mail your ballot in, you can go to any in-person polling place in the state to register and vote in person. And I think that model is going to ensure some of the most inclusive elections this year.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you for that, Seth. We’re going to go to our last question. The state government in Virginia has taken some important steps to expand voting access; however, some elements to society are seeking to undermine faith in the system even though fundamentally, it’s run by citizens just like them. How can we can overcome this distrust? This question is for anyone.

Seth Flaxman:

It is a helpful truth that Americans are most trusting of our election system at the most local level, and so we are building on a strength luckily in that case where it’s reassuring that you might run into your local election official at the grocery store, or otherwise it’s easier to trust that they’re just a professional doing the best they can. So I would try to reinforce that trust with local election officials as much as possible in your community, or if you have other means to speak out on that, especially in a year where we are seeing state election administrators . . . these are the folks that work for the secretaries, they’re less political, but also the folks at the county and town level . . . be purposefully politicized through disinformation to try to undermine trust in our system. So these folks need as much support as they can get right now.

Ali Khan:

I’d only add, I think, to Seth’s great point is that we are trying to expand the base of trusted individuals who can actually help with that work. So by actively trying to engage nurses, physicians, firefighters, sort of the professions that we know are trusted and viewed as reliable from the longstanding data, to be able to dig in at that granular level, at the local election office level, is sort of that to be engaged in working as co-workers, election monitors, offering Covid-19 advice, public education campaigns, whatever is necessary. We are actively trying to say irrespective of your party affiliation or partisan ideology, we have a healthy democracy to invest in. So as much as we can do that, again in partnership as Seth mentioned, and Christina has mentioned, with all the organizations here, the better.

Teresa Acuña:

Awesome. Thank you for that. So I may do one last plug for voteschallenge.harvard.edu. You can check your voter registration, you can request a mail-in ballot, certainly learn more about being a poll worker. Please let everyone know the site is not just for the Harvard community, it’s definitely open to anyone who is interested. And before we wrap up, I want to do one, quick hot take from each of our panelists. So what is one last takeaway, last reminder, that you want to leave our audience with?

Christina Fletes:

Make a voting plan and encourage others to make a voting plan. What does that mean? Register to vote, confirm that you’re registered, if you need to re-register because you moved or changed your language preference, do that. Be a smart voter, try to research all the ballot initiatives in local races. Know how to submit your ballot, whether that’s voting in person, or voting by mail, or dropping off your ballot at a secure ballot dropbox location. Know your voting rights, and then vote as early as possible and confirm that your ballot has been received. And then finally, encourage others to make a voting plan and vote. If you can just get three of your friends to vote, and remind them to register to vote, and then follow up with them and make sure that they voted, that will make a significant difference.

Seth Flaxman:

One hundred percent everything Christina said. Make a voting plan, vote as early as you can to take pressure away from election day, so that lines on election day are as short as possible. If you are going to be a source of information for others in your community, make sure you have your information right. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. So for example, if you Google how to vote, all that information is helpfully summarized, we work with Google to make sure that they have a sort of like clean, summarized how to vote, how to register stuff at the top of Google. That is accurate. You can push that out, you can just tell people Google it if you want to. I think beyond that is there are forces right now trying to undermine our election by convincing us to lose faith in it, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we are pessimistic. So it is helpful to inject some optimism into this election because I also think we can build our own self-fulfilling prophecy here where we will see an election with extremely high turnout, and results that are legitimate and accepted. And where every vote is counted, and I do really believe that, and I think that’s something folks in this room can help spread that message, too.

Ali Khan:

I can’t add on anything that these guys haven’t already said except for two things. One, ask for help. This audience and this crew is a smart bunch and used to figuring out things by yourselves, this is complicated, use your HKS community, use your friends, use your local officials, whatever, but ask for help because this is complex and new regulations are being put in every single day. So don’t be afraid of that. And second, just from one of the organizations that we work, take five of your friends, there are five family members, whatever, that lives in any state, but ideally a battleground, and just confirm with them, are they registered? Do they have a voting plan? And do they have any barriers? You would be surprised, I spent this last weekend texting 20 of my family members, half of them do not share my political ideology and was astonished by how many people thought, “Oh, yeah, I’m registered,” but they weren’t. Or had had an address change or something else. So if you care about the health of our democracy, the more you can use relationships to drive meaningful impact, the better.

Teresa Acuña:

Awesome. Well, thank you for that and thanks for everyone for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure. And my hot take is everything that’s been said and just get out there and vote and bring your friends and family with you. It’s really, really important, we have a lot on the line, but more importantly it’s about something bigger than us, it’s for our country. So with that, I’ll turn it over to Karen.

Karen Bonadio:

Yes, I just want to say thank you, Teresa, to our moderator and thank you to our panelists, Seth, Ali, and Christina. I definitely learned a lot today and we look forward to keeping everyone who joined us and our alumni base, keeping you engaged in the future with these Alumni Talk Policy discussions. Stay tuned for our next event in mid-November, which will focus on Covid in leadership, and please visit our website for the most up-to-date school information and news.

Stay healthy, everyone. Thank you so much.

Teresa Acuña:

Thank you.