Priming the Polls | Voter Outreach in Western NC

The North Carolina primary election is March 5 and early voting is already underway. But the Republican supermajority in the stage legislature has passed laws making voting more difficult.

My guests today are Robin Lively Summers of Indivisible Asheville and Leslie Boyd of the Poor People’s Campaign. They’re part of a coalition of nonprofits working to educate and engage prospective voters in Western North Carolina. Others working in this effort are the YWCA of Asheville, Just Economics and Asheville Food & Beverage United. 

We’ll talk about their work on the ground, overcoming challenges presented by new restrictive voting laws and how they’re working to encourage seemingly low-incentive voters out to the polls.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: How did you get organizations with differing priorities to come together behind this voter outreach effort?
 
Leslie Boyd: We have something in common. 

Robin Lively Summers: And we have a party. 

Leslie Boyd: Yeah, that helps you know, you have a few sodas maybe some beer. 

Robin Lively Summers: We organized a celebration of Our work so far and we invited people who were Leslie and the rjc and just economics Thank you the green alliance.

We invited all of them To participate in this celebration. And it came out from there that we said, we should all work together because we have a common goal and that's to get out the vote and target these progressive left leaning maybe, but non high propensity voters. We need everybody engaged.

Matt Peiken: You just said a description, these aren't high propensity voters. Tell me what is prohibiting or what inhibits, what seems to blunt? 

Leslie Boyd: There's lots of reasons. Talk about that. You feel powerless when you're poor, you're exhausted, you're powerless. You take on one more thing, oh my god, I gotta learn who's on the ballot and vote, and I just don't, I'm so tired, I work three jobs.

People who are poor, Really need help in getting registered and getting to the polls and understanding the issues. I know what their lives are like. I've lived in poverty when my kids were little. I wouldn't wish it on anyone and We're not going to get out of it without the ballot box, And so people who feel defeated like they just don't have the energy to learn about all of this and vote, those are the votes we need. 

Robin Lively Summers: And our legislature has actively worked to make voting more complex, more challenging.

And so it takes that much more effort on all of our parts to ensure that people have access to the information. They have access to where do they go to vote? What are these new laws about voter ID? What's involved with an absentee ballot now? All of those challenges, we have to not only get that information out there, but then also provide the supports.

Do you need a copy of your ID? We have little handheld copy machines so that if somebody needs that, we can provide that for them. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned some of the things the legislature has done to restrict the, go into detail about some of these things. Now, the other side would argue, we are trying to make elections more secure. We need to secure the vote and make sure everybody who is eligible to vote is just voting once. 

Leslie Boyd: they're trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist, and they say it exists, but there's never been any proof that it exists. And what they wanna do is have fewer people voting.

They wanna choose their voters. gerrymandered to the max, and when they did it before, and it was taken to federal court, the courts made them redraw the boundaries. It took them four court orders before they would redraw the boundaries. 

Matt Peiken: And even then, let's be clear about this, they kind of ran out the clock, didn't they?

So they, even though the Supreme Court at the time, the North Carolina State Supreme Court ruled that you have to redraw your lines, eventually the clock ran out, and they had to use the existing maps, and that was part of the strategy, also, of the legislature. 

Leslie Boyd: And they also send out letters, and if the letters come back, they just purge the voter. 

Matt Peiken: Let's talk about how do you believe that The efforts at the legislature are systemic in terms of blunting the vote, of limiting the vote.

Robin Lively Summers: Using the basis of this argument that we're trying to make voting safer, they're targeting specific actions that are focused mainly on people that would vote against the legislature's party, which is the Republicans. So the poor people, students, people who tend to vote Democratic are the people that are immediately impacted by these bills that they are ramming through the legislature. 

Leslie Boyd: Poor people are the ones they want to target because poor people want relief and they will vote for that. They will vote for a higher minimum wage. They will vote for things that'll make their lives better. Things that we should have. Healthcare. Better education.

And the loss of the community newspaper has made it that much harder for people to learn about the candidates. You have to go out of your way. And if you're working two or three jobs and you've got two kids at home and your bills are still overwhelming you, you are not going to reach out and look for the information. You're going to fall into bed at the end of the day because you're only going to get five or six hours sleep and then it's back to work.

Matt Peiken: Is that person also very reluctant to vote? Because you're talking about all the things going on in their lives. You talked about how they're not a high propensity voter. As it is. You mentioned gerrymandering. We didn't even talk about restricting or limiting early voting access, drop off locations for mail in ballots.

lThe ist goes on. But what are the challenges you face, you and your colleague organizations face, in terms of Encouraging people who, whether it's poor people racial minorities, others who tend to be low of vote or turnout. How do we encourage them to vote? 

Robin Lively Summers: The big thing is to try and reach out to leaders within those communities.

One of the things that we are focusing on is a Latin Hispanic outreach. We have a woman who is very active in her african american community, getting people to vote, supporting people who have to do absentee voting.

We need to be involved with those communities as a partner, not as a savior, but as a partner, so we need to go in there and say, we want to help you. What do you need? And then listen to what they say, and then help try to use our resources to supply that assistance.

Leslie Boyd: And meeting people face to face. One thing I learned as United Way captain where I used to work is if you don't ask, you're not going to get a yes.

But if you ask, you're much more likely to get a yes. So knocking on doors, going to events and having tables there with information this is what we have ,to do. We have to really work to reach out. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned a scenario a little while ago, Leslie, that you're working two jobs, you have a couple kids, you come home and collapse, you may not even be able to make time to vote, or set aside time you don't think you can.

What are some of the psychological hurdles? Also, I imagine People just think, what is my vote going to make a difference? It's so easy to be cynical these days about, where our government 

Leslie Boyd: is. And a lot of the media are pushing that cynicism. 

Matt Peiken: So how do you and your colleagues how do you leapfrog these efforts by big media, others that have a lot of money. Your organizations don't have a lot of money, right?

Robin Lively Summers: There's a lot of research, there's new research out there that says that low income poor people are actually way more central than this bipartisan dichotomy that we've been fed. They really are just looking for somebody that is going to protect them or give them something, which is why Trump is appealing to them because he says he's going to do for them.

But they hear that and that's what they believe. So for us, what our goals are is to ask and do that deep dive: what are your concerns? What would make your life better? And then be able to provide information as this is what the candidates say, and this is their records.

Matt Peiken: A little while ago, you mentioned that your colleague organizations tend to come from a progressive standpoint. This is just Getting prospective voters to vote. That's non partisan. 

Robin Lively Summers: We are non partisan. 

Leslie Boyd: Yeah, we are too. There's politics and there's partisanship.

We talk policy. That's the thing. It's the policies that are important. The third reconstruction comes from changes in policy. A wage that will, if you work 40 hours, give you a livable life.

Matt Peiken: So you're trying to reach people about where they are in terms of the issues they care about. Do you find a disconnect, that people don't understand that the challenges in their lived lives can be affected by Electoral politics. Is there a disconnect there? 

Leslie Boyd: I find that when you say to people You know the conversation goes a little like this.

I don't vote. Why not? Because it ain't going to make a difference. It is going to make a difference because nothing is solved until we get people in office who are willing to solve these problems. Now, when Tim Moffitt was my representative in Raleigh, I did a lot of door to door when Brian Turner ran against him.

And I ran into Poor people and Republicans and all kinds of people who just couldn't stand him because he was arrogant. And so when I said don't not vote, he has an opponent. They would say, give me information about his opponent. And Tim Moffitt lost that election. And that was because we were on the streets, knocking on doors, talking to people about the issues.

Not about Tim Moffitt, but about the issues. 

Matt Peiken: Are you finding that many of the people you're approaching are not even registered or are they lapsed voters? 

Robin Lively Summers: So our 2020 campaign during the height of covid we reached 4400 people, and I would say we probably registered 20.

We didn't find people weren't registered, or at least they thought they were. A couple of times we would look them up and see that, is this your address? It's no, I've moved. You need to go update your registration. That may have been maybe 10 percent of the time. But most people are registered. The question is whether or not they're actually going and voting. And especially the midterms and those down ballots. For example, this last midterm election, the Democrats lost the Supreme court by 400 votes, 4, 000 people in Buncombe County alone did not vote in that election.

Leslie Boyd: Right, and these are numbers that Reverend Barbara touts all the time, too. If we get poor and low wealth voters to the polls, we won't lose. The Poor People's Campaign, nationally, has done a lot of studying on this. And when they went to Kentucky, before Governor Beshear was elected, they went to Eastern Kentucky, the really poor part of the state, and they held rallies, and they registered voters, and Beshear squeaked through and won.

And that's because poor people don't expect anybody to pay attention to them. They don't feel like they matter. 

Matt Peiken: Let's be clear about this too. A lot of people running for office, including Democrats, aren't very good about articulating and emphasizing how their policies will help people on the margins.

Leslie Boyd: Because people in poverty don't matter to policy makers. It's true. They don't have the money to help them get reelected. It's like trying to get kids support. They can't vote for you, so they don't matter. And poor people don't matter to them. 

Matt Peiken: So while your efforts to, the voter outreach effort, I think in some ways has to be connected to what potential policy makers are saying.

Because if the voters, or prospective voters, are not hearing Candidates talk about issues that matter to them, it's only you telling them that it matters. If they're not hearing this from the candidates, I would think that needs to be a co joined effort. 

Robin Lively Summers: Yeah we're not allowed to work with candidates if we're gonna maintain our non our C3404 status.

But one thing that we do as we get closer to elections is we vet candidates. So if they have not been in office, we will screen their policies will, what are you standing for? What are you saying? And we can disseminate that information. If they have been in office, we compare what they're saying with what their record is. So they'll say, Oh yeah, we support a woman's right to choose. And we think that, abortion should be legal in certain situations. Yeah. What you voted for this and this, which took away access. So You know we're willing to look at a candidate regardless of their party affiliation and say, this is what you've done in the past.

And that's why the primaries are so important because an incumbent could be saying all the right things, but that doesn't mean that's how they voted. 

Matt Peiken: I want to bring up something that dials back a few minutes to something you mentioned about when people vote or haven't voted. They might be registered but haven't voted. Wasn't there an effort at the legislature To purge people from the tolls of voters if they missed election exactly if they haven't voted in one election They get wiped off the rolls.

Leslie Boyd: That's another way to get rid of voters. To make college students go home to vote. That was another thing they wanted to do. And you just have to fight them and fight them.

And the Poor People's Campaign did. That was our lawsuit that went all the way to the federal courts. And with people saying if you haven't voted, then you don't deserve to vote. And, last election, it was 2022, They had just passed legislation that allowed people who'd been convicted of felonies and served their time to vote again.

So we set up outside the courthouse and as people came by we said, Have you registered to vote at your current address? Most of these people who had felonies on their record did not know that this law had been passed. I registered alone more than 20 voters in less than a week. And that was just among people coming out of the courthouse.

Matt Peiken: The fact that you stood in front of a courthouse for people coming out of having a felony on their record and registered them, that, that shows a lot of dedication. 20 voters doesn't seem like much. 

Leslie Boyd: It could be enough. When you combine it with other people's efforts.

Robin Lively Summers: How many down ballot races are won or lost by four, five, six votes?

It happens way more often than people realize. And that's why it is so important for people to have access to the information so that they can feel confident going in and voting all the way down their ballots. Because the local stuff what's happening in Asheville, it's what's going to affect your life. It's what's going to affect my life immediately. What's happening on the federal level might come tax season or something like that. But really, that doesn't affect me. I didn't get a benefit from the last tax cut. I'm not part of that group. But what happens for the infrastructure bills that they're putting through and the housing that they're doing.

Matt Peiken: So let's talk about the efforts that the specific things that your initiative is doing. Talk about what you're doing on the ground. 

Robin Lively Summers: Okay. So we have three areas that we are focusing on. We have our canvassing group. Which will go door to door providing voting information, helping to get IDs, that kind of stuff.

All about, it's all about voting. Getting people out to vote. What do they need? We'll be asking what are the issues that we want, so that when we go to vet candidates, we have those questions that are being told to us. This is what people are worried about. How are you going to address this? All the new voting restrictions as far as I. D. And where can you vote? When can you vote? That's what we're gonna be focusing on in our canvases. We have our tabling group which will be going to different locations in buncombe madison henderson and possibly haywood county offering voter registration information, new photo ids and also the absentee voting information, which is so important because so many people were using that program, that option during covid.

And now they've made it so that we are really encouraging voters to please don't use the absentee ballot unless it's Absolutely necessary because there's just so many rules and restrictions that it's so much easier. We also have our Latino Hispanic outreach group, which is focusing on going into that community and in a safe and respectful way. 

Leslie Boyd: And the other thing that I was going to mention is there is a very good voter guide that's put out by Children First. 

Robin Lively Summers: The League of Women Voters, they put out a good free copy.

Matt Peiken: Robin, I think I interrupted you when you were going through the the specific changes in voting laws that you're now having to educate people about and help them over.

Continue, I'm sorry I interrupted. 

Robin Lively Summers: No, that's okay. So Most people have heard about the voter I. D. That you have to have an I. D. When you go to vote. They have limited the number of places that we can go to vote. While North Carolina still is allowing for same day registration during early voting, which is a great.

So if you're not sure about your voter registration, go to early voting, you can go to any branch and register the same day that you put in your vote. That's a great thing, but you have to have an ID. The list is pretty extensive, but it's very leaning towards a certain demographic.

So like you can have a gun license but your college ID won't work.  

Leslie Boyd: That was addressed last time, and all that got overturned as soon as Overturned, 

Robin Lively Summers: yes, because as soon as they got the Supreme Court, they went back and re litigated all of these laws that had been struck down.

They just overturned everything, yeah. And then the absentee ballot is very complicated. It has to be notarized of which we will have notary team, So that when we go out, we'll be able to provide that for people. There has to be a copy of your photo ID included. There is an external envelope, an internal envelope.

There's extra signatures that you have to make sure you sign both envelopes. It's really complicated, and they made it that way on purpose. Purpose. Right? On purpose. And it has to arrive by election day. Election day, yeah. There's no grace period, right? It has to be. So if you're not sure about the post office, you gotta remember that anything that's mailed within Asheville, it goes to Greenville, South Carolina before it comes back here.

Matt Peiken: So yeah, to be clear that it used to be if you're postmarked. 

Robin Lively Summers: Now it has to arrive. 

Matt Peiken: So you mentioned the canvassing that you're doing. Are there other things that this coalition is doing in the way of voter outreach and voter education? 

Robin Lively Summers: Right now we're just trying to get out the vote.

That's our main focus. As we get closer to the general election we probably will be looking at candidate vetting. 

Matt Peiken: Let me ask, is this tied into any statewide efforts. Are the things you're doing here in Buncombe County or in Asheville specific, is it external? Are there other networks that you're tying into? 

Robin Lively Summers: We are loosely affiliated with Indivisible North Carolina, which is part of Indivisible National. We have access to their toolkits, resources, fundraising, that kind of stuff. Same with us. We do we do connect with them and let them know what we are doing and they are very supportive of our efforts so that, like I said language, access to our van, which is a canvassing tool all of those things come through those other sources.

Leslie Boyd: And we've got the same kind of state and national network that For example, we're going to be holding a rally on March 2nd, and it's all leading up to getting out the vote. So we're going to hold this rally in Raleigh on March 2nd. And we're hoping for thousands and thousands of people.

Matt Peiken: Obviously you're taking language and other strategies from the statewide and national organizations. Are there conditions on the ground here that are unique or different? How you're tailoring what you're doing here, is it specific to Asheville and the challenges of reaching people in Asheville and Buncombe County that may be Other areas don't have quite as much.

Robin Lively Summers: Asheville is unique I always say we're the blueberry in the tomato soup.

Matt Peiken: I always say we're the hopeful blue pupil in the angry red eye of Conservatism. I like yours better. 

Robin Lively Summers: So for us we have a contingency of very progressive people in this very concentrated area. And and then, but around us, it's very conservative republican leaning.

So we have that dynamic of making sure that we're getting out and letting the people know that are maybe our progressive little farther field, that they're not alone and that they are. Their vote does matter. And please, just because, all your neighbors have Confederate flags out doesn't mean that your vote isn't going to be even more important.

We're not unique in the United States while we may be the only in North Carolina There are other places out there that have little bastions of progressive, yeah, right at Austin, Texas. So there are places that are similar and there is a coalition within national.

It's the rural caucus where we talk about things that are specific to our area and we bring that to what do we need to do as a coalition that is best going to support our voters here in Western North Carolina. 

Matt Peiken: Is there anything we haven't talked about around this initiative, around your strategies or challenges you're facing that you think is important for people to understand and know?

Robin Lively Summers: One thing that I'd like to bring up is why are we nonpartisan and why is it nonpartisan? Why aren't we just targeting Democrats or progressive? And I really want to point out that nonpartisan voter outreach offers opportunities for people to have common ground so that it's about understanding truly what is important to these nonparticipating voters.

What matters to you, what's going to make your life better? What policies, because those people who are not voting matter, they're Americans and they should have their needs met. And there's more commonality than there is diversion. 

Matt Peiken: One of the things i've heard just in the vapors because I don't read conservative media, But one of the things I hear is that the efforts to get more people to vote In itself it's demonized.

Leslie Boyd: They're afraid of it .They're afraid of it.

Matt Peiken: That the very notion of Helping people, assisting people to vote, educating them to vote, somehow is anathema to American values, that this is cheating. 

Leslie Boyd: This is not about Democrat or Republican, and it's not about right or left. It's about right and wrong. It's about immorality versus morality. 

Robin Lively Summers: If we are doing this nonpartisan voter outreach, it's proven to change policy for sporadic voters who are often felt like they're left out when they are empowered, engaged and educated, then they vote for the people that are going to put the policies that they need, especially down ballot.

Leslie Boyd: That's who defeated Trump. Those are the very people who defeated Donald Trump. They knew that this was an important election. They heard that message and they came out and voted. The voting tallies were amazing, right? 

Robin Lively Summers: So we just have to do that. We have to get the disenfranchised back into the fray.

And the only way we can do that is to go and tell them your vote does matter. Here's how you can do it. It's not impossible. It's possible. And we're here to help you. What do you need? And regardless of what side of the aisle, if you say this is the person that's going to protect your social security, this is the person that's moving to have universal health care.

This is the person that took away and cut the school lunch program. This is the person that took away and cut your access to the ballot box. Who do you want to vote for? Go, let us know. Go do it. Don't even tell me. Just go do it. 

Leslie Boyd: I've had many people say to me when I'm registering them to vote, one guy said to me, I guess it was last time I'm going to vote for Trump, and I said, that's your right.

And it's beyond a right, voting really is an obligation. If you want to live in a democracy. 

Matt Peiken: A lot of people don't look at it as an obligation. We have more people who don't vote in this country than do vote. 

Robin Lively Summers: And if, it's like, Oh I'm already registered. Let's check you. Oh, you're actually not registered anymore. They kicked you off.

Oh, I think I want to register. Here you go. 

Leslie Boyd: And the question to ask is always, are you registered to vote at your current address? Because if you moved since you last voted, you're going to get kicked off the roll. So you need to be registered at your current address.