The election in November is going to be won by getting out the vote. It is crucial that we all go out and vote. Traditional campaigns always include a component that focuses on getting their voters to the polls which means getting people registered, pumping up enthusiasm, and, then, literally, getting them physically to the polls. As you know, #COVID19 has pretty much shot that model all to Hello Kitty! Now, we get the new plan: Send Postcards to Swing State Voters! Sounds like fun, right!

Aside: You should also make sure you are all set up to vote by using the League of Women Voters snazzy website, VOTE411 to make sure you are registered, haven’t been purged, find your polling place, and find out what is on your ballot.

About a million years ago on 2 January, I wrote a post about a brilliant idea Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, had posted on Twitter: spend your vacation volunteering for a get out the vote campaign in a swing state. Now that seemed like fun and very doable for many of us. I had visions of spending time living in an RV in Michigan knocking on doors and being on a phone bank team. But, alas and alack #COVID10 put the kibosh on that idea. Luckily, we can all sit in self-isolation and send postcards to voters in swing states, right?

You know how much we believe in participatory democracy here at Ye Olde Blogge, right? Tanden’s idea was right up our ally. We even wrote a second post about it about a million years later on 7 February. I went to town with it, too, including links to state Democratic parties, Neera Tanden’s contact page, various GotV campaigns, and specific political campaigns. It was going to be beautiful, until we ran into the social distancing requirements of #COVID19 forcing us to come up with other ideas like sending postcards to voters in swing state.

Judging by the complete lack of a cease and desist letters coming from Neera Tanden, I’d say, not many of you contacted her asking for help to volunteer. Seriously, she said she would help hook people up like some kind of progressive match maker. Luckily, the postcards to swing states folks don’t need all the hands on stuff to get you going. Here’s what you do:

Step 1: Sign up! When you sign up, they want you to choose between these two messages to send:

And they give you this third option because they want an even number of both messages. So, there’s that. You know what they say, having options makes for good mental health.

Let us know which message you’ve chosen in the comments, hunh? You know, a sign of life.

They go on to tell us that postcards work! To date 25,673 volunteers have sent 2,015,750 postcards to ten swing states! You could be the 25,674th volunteer! Imagine that!

They provide the postcards, you provide the stamps ($0.35) and, one presumes, the mailbox. The do, however, ask that you send them in October because the closer to the actual election, the more likely the person you are writing to will actually vote.

They’re targeting ten swing states that are swingy, and you’ve probably read about them in the news. They aren’t targeting any of the more recent states added to that list, however. Here are the states they’re targeting:

There you have it! Go ahead and sign up. Tell us in the comments about your experience like which message you chose and the type of stamps you bought and all that stuff.

Isn’t participating in democracy FUN and INTERESTING?

Image Attribution

To produce the featured image, I took screenshots of each image off of their header, and, then, used my super tech media manipulation skills to produce the deep fake that you see up there. That’s right, I used Microsoft Paint to combine them and turn the whole thing into a .jpg image. I guess that’s why I won the Noble Peace prize for blogging.

The other images are all screenshots from their website. They have such good artwork, don’t they?