Go Blue? Go Vote!
What did voting during a global pandemic really look like?
—By Grace Shulman
“The vote is precious. It’s almost sacred, so go out and vote like you never voted before.” – John Lewis
Having grown up in Washington D.C, I was primed to live in an environment that was extremely politically active, and both in my personal life and in my news consumption I was constantly surrounded by political figures. Political figures who, much like John Lewis in the quote above, ingrained in me the importance of voting, political participation, and civic engagement. So, while some kids were anxiously awaiting the day they could drive a car or have their first legal sip of alcohol, I was anticipating the day that I could cast a ballot. (Though, that’s not to say I wasn’t also excited about the former).
But whether or not you grew up in an environment like mine, it’s undeniable that voting is one of the most important rights and responsibilities that a U.S. citizen has. In a country with more than 300 million people, I understand that it can sometimes feel that your vote doesn’t matter. Well, that could not be further from the truth. Your vote is your voice, which is one of the most powerful tools we have! Because with our voices, we hold the power to make change happen. How cool is that?
I turned 18 in June of 2017, and that long-lived dream of voting became a reality during the midterm elections of 2018. So by the time the fall of 2020 rolled around, it was my first time voting in a Presidential election and it was my first time voting as a registered Michigan resident! The latter was especially important to me because…
Back in 2016, nearly 100 million eligible Americans did not cast a vote for president, representing 43% of the eligible voting-age population. And when it came to the state of Michigan, Donald Trump won by such a razor-thin margin (0.3%), a margin that could have been changed had more people showed up at the polls. I want to make it clear that this article is intended to be as non-partisan as possible. But still, one thing that we know for certain is that turning out to vote allows people to have their voices heard towards picking a nominee that they feel best represents them, and a good working democracy depends on voter turnout and having every voice heard. After the 2016 election, it soon became clear to me that the stakes were too high, and that our democracy depended on more voter turnout, especially in a state like Michigan.
But the truth was that by the fall of 2020, voting felt more precarious than ever. Was the pandemic going to hinder our ability to cast a ballot? Was the pandemic going to help our ability to cast a ballot? What did voting during a pandemic look like? How was I going to vote? How were we all going to vote?
New Voting Options
Voting this past fall looked drastically different than it had in any other years past. As the Coronavirus pandemic loomed over us, it had the potential to perpetuate and exacerbate years of voter disenfranchisement, because for tens of millions of Americans the traditional visit to the polling site on Election day may not have been an option.
Many Americans were truly concerned that they would be forced to pick between avoiding contact with people to stay healthy and exercising their right to vote in November. Although we had all hoped that the fall would bring some sense of normalcy to our lives, the truth was that cases were still spiking high. And especially for people who were of an older age group, immuno-compromised, quarantined, or acting as caregivers, having a mail-in ballot option was necessary for them to participate in the democratic process.
And yet, while many people depended on a vote-by-mail option, it wasn’t a viable option for everyone and we couldn’t have simply just eliminated all in-person voting options. Specifically, had we done so, it would have disproportionately harmed “African American voters, voters with disabilities, and American Indian and Alaska Native voters,” according to American Progress.
So, while it was evident the old election infrastructure needed to be reformed, it also couldn’t entirely be thrown out the window either. There needed to be a middle ground between the two. What that meant was that states needed to take the necessary steps to implement laws that would protect all voters and ensure safe, efficient, and equitable voting during this global pandemic.
Luckily for Michigan Residents, back in 2018, about two-thirds of Michigan voters welcomed a new law referred to as Proposal 3, or “Promote the Vote.” The proposal allowed for no-reason absentee voting, automatic voter registration for people obtaining or renewing their driver’s license or state ID card, and same-day registration and voting up until and through Election Day. Although supporters of “Promote the Vote,” could never have anticipated this pandemic, it’s clear that the laws were the saving grace of this Election cycle.
This was significant because according to a Washington Post article titled “Low Voter Turnout Is No Accident,” voting access laws, which vary significantly from state to state, affect how easy it is to cast a ballot. Such laws are either voter registration deadlines, restrictions on registrations and registration drives, pre-registration laws, laws governing the ease of voting absentee, voter ID requirements, and polling hours. The 5 most restrictive states when it came to voting access, such as Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, had nearly a 9% lower turnout than the 5 states considered the “easiest” to vote in.
Before “Promote the Vote,” the right to vote absentee in Michigan was limited to people who were 60 years of age or older, disabled, who worked at the polls, or people who provided signed affidavits saying they would not be in town the day of the Election.
For the 2020 Election cycle, under the expansion of Michigan’s voting rights; early voting for the November election started on September 24 and allowed every eligible individual to vote each day up until election day, including on election day. Additionally, any individual was able to request an absentee ballot, in person, at their local clerk’s office as late as 4 pm the day before the election, or online before October 30.
As seen by Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, voters of both parties did benefit from having more options to cast their ballots this past election. He writes, “imagine the polling place lines if most voters this year instead had to vote on Election Day while also abiding by social distancing rules. The lines would have been amazingly long.” And indeed, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 94% of voters said that voting in this past election was “easy,” and that they enjoyed having so many options to choose from when it came to casting their ballot, whether that meant voting in person while adhering to CDC guidelines or safely casting a ballot at home.
The Crisis On College Campuses
Traditionally, colleges are “hotbeds of political engagement,” with the University of Michigan, in particular, having “a long tradition of politically active students, dating back to the Vietnam War protests,” writes Farah Stockman for the New York Times. Get Out the Vote efforts begin buzzing across college campuses in the summer, and passionate speakers often make their way to the center of the Diag, in some capacity.
For many students, voting is a new process, and it’s not always easy figuring out how to cast a ballot for the first time, or for the first time in a new state (like me!), especially as requirements vary state by state. GOTV efforts provide students with the answers to their questions and the tools to have their votes count and their voices heard. Alice Huth, a senior in the School of Information explained that “the website where I tried to register to vote was not intuitive, but luckily there were so many helpful infographics around campus and tons of people who were willing to be a resource.”
On the University of Michigan campus, much of those efforts and events were centered around the Big Ten Voting Challenge. Launched in 2017, The Big Ten Voting Challenge is a competition between all the Universities in the Big 10 Conference targeted towards promoting civic engagement and getting students to go out and vote. At the end of the election season, the winning universities are awarded trophies.
If we know anything about Big 10 schools, it’s that they are competitive and they like to win. So, it only makes sense that this initiative was extremely successful. In the 2018 midterm elections, the Big 10 Voting Challenge spiked the average student voting rate at the University of Michigan to 43%, surpassing the national average student voting rate of 40%, and more than doubling the national student voting rate of 19% in 2014.
When I spoke with Erin Byrnes, a leader for Democratic Engagement and Big Ten Voting Challenge, she told me that in a normal election year, their team would have been out in high-trafficked spaces around campus, starting in late August. By August 2020, that option was no longer viable. Not only had safety concerns moved many in-person events virtual, but the pandemic had forced many students off of their college campuses and into a remote-learning setting. There just wouldn’t be the same high trafficked areas anymore.
According to Erin, the real crisis occurred when “2 weeks out from election day, campus had the stay-at-home order put in place.” She told me that the way Michigan election law works is that when it is 2 weeks or closer to the election, to register to vote, you had to go in person and could no longer do so online. And although an email from President Mark Schlissel from October 20 mentioned that an exemption to the order included “voting or volunteering as poll workers,” that information was not well communicated and was actually found halfway down the email. If I know anything about being a college student, it’s that most of us will stop reading if we’re longer interested in what’s being communicated, and I’m sure no one was particularly excited about an email titled: “County Stay in Place Order.”
And because of that, Erin’s team needed to find a way to communicate to students that despite the stay-at-home order, we all could still go vote and register to vote. How that came to fruition was through the GoVote.Umich.edu website, an email just for voting questions: voterRegQuestions@UMich.edu, and a texting platform: 833-4UM-VOTE.
However, “What ultimately streamlined our messaging was the Satellite City Clerk’s Office at the UMMA, which drove everybody to one location where they could fulfill all their voting needs,” said Erin.
The Solution: The University of Michigan Museum of Art
The Ann Arbor City Clerk Satellite Office at the UMMA was, “a collaborative effort,” Erin told me. Kick-started by Stephanie Rowden and Hannah Smotrich, two professors at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, the city of Ann Arbor helped transform our Art Museum into the state’s first satellite city clerk’s office located on a University campus.
It was a one-stop-shop for students to register to vote, fill out, and cast early absentee ballots on campus up until the day before Election day. The UMMA opened on September 22, which was National Voter Registration Day, and remained open until November 3, its goal to make voting as clear, easy, and safe as possible.
And that’s precisely what it did. “I found it easy to cast a ballot, but as an out-of-state student who wanted to vote in Michigan, the UMMA definitely made that process easier,” Noelle Enkema, a senior in the School of Information, told me. She went on to say that before hearing about her option to vote at the UMMA, she was very overwhelmed with the whole voting process. And although she said she would have still found a way to vote had the UMMA not been an option, in a survey of 14 randomly selected students, 5 said that they would not have. That’s almost 36% of students (give or take some, had the pool I surveyed had been larger) who would have not done their civic duty to vote, had it not been for this option. Wow.
Kennedy Wade, another senior, explained to me how the whole process at the UMMA was, “super easy, especially as compared to the 2018 midterms. In 2018, I found registration was really hard and no one was there to help me and guide me.” But at the UMMA, they had tons of volunteers who answered any question a student may have had, who guided the process of changing registration from someone’s home state to Michigan, and who helped students get registered in the first place. In my own experience, the whole process took no more than 10 minutes, whereas if I had tried to do it myself, it could have taken hours.
Finally, Erin explained how, above all, “during a challenging year, during a pandemic, it gave people a physical place to go and have that camaraderie around voting which was helpful not only in terms of voting but also mental health.” As we all know too well, the pandemic has brought with it unique feelings of isolation and sadness. But when people all come together to do something good, such as vote, you can’t help but feel a collective “we.”
So, as teachers sent emails to their students and reminded them to vote at the UMMA at the end of class, and as roommates came home to show off their “I voted” stickers to their other roommates, what was building was a community of voters. A community of people bonded under a collective identity, excited about the chance to engage, despite the pandemic.
What some people may not realize is that this experience at the UMMA was so unique and special, especially when compared to voting access in many other communities. Because as troubling as it may be, voting access is not equal everywhere. Not even close. In particular, many of the barriers to voting come from the lack of resources, time, and money that are disproportionately limited in low-income and minority communities.
This past fall, I took a Political Science class titled “Detroit Votes,” and what I learned was that black citizens for whom the poverty rate is close to 3 times that of white citizens are: 3 times as likely to not have a requisite ID, 3 times as likely to have difficulty finding the correct polling place, more than 3 times as likely to not receive a requested absentee ballot, 2 times more likely to have to wait in long lines, and more likely to report transportation problems when trying to vote. Not only that, but discrepancies in outreach to lower-income and minority communities often perpetuate feelings of detachment from the voting process, a feeling that their vote doesn’t matter.
Our experience at the UMMA stands in stark contrast with that. We all should acknowledge how very fortunate we are to be a part of a community that encourages us to vote, and that provides us with the tools and resources that make it easy for us to vote.
Will these new processes remain in place?
In a year when voting felt more precarious than ever, millions of Americans still came out to vote. And on the University of Michigan campus, thousands of students flocked to the UMMA to have their voices heard. To be exact, as of November 6, there were 7,368 student ballots counted.
Although I cannot speak for those other 7,367 students, I believe that it was ultimately these new voting measures and processes that were put into place both in 2018 and because of the pandemic that made voting so easy this past fall. When I spoke with Ann Arbor City Clerk Jacqueline Beaudry, she referred to the pandemic as “helping speed up the implementation of new progressive reforms such as no-reason absentee voting. For, although we were preparing to open our office before the pandemic, I think having the UMMA definitely helped students during the pandemic,” Simply put, the convenience of the UMMA, the expansion of absentee voting, and the prolonged period for casting ballots opened the doors to access at The University of Michigan, and the state as a whole.
Beaudry ended our conversation leaving me with this; “I think many people moved from in-person to no-reason absentee voting, or early in-person absentee voting, due to the pandemic. But having the choice to vote at your convenience in a 40-day window, as compared to waiting in line on one day is likely to be the preferred method of voting moving forward.” It’s true, we don’t know what the post-pandemic future holds. But as states continue to implement these new election processes, there is the potential to forever alter elections and political participation, not just on college campuses, but across the nation.
Despite that, there are currently legislative efforts afoot trying to restrict voting access in Michigan, and elsewhere. And so, these changes that helped bring about such vast voter turnout both at the University of Michigan and across the nation are under attack. Where that leaves us going forward in future elections, I’m not sure. Perhaps that is a discussion for someone else’s article.
Feature Photo: Grace Shulman Outside the University of Michigan Museum of Art