UU the Vote by phone banking with UUCPA!

Dear wonderful postcard/ letter writers and friends,

If you want to attend a phone bank with other UUCPA members and friends, join Nancy Neff and Elsa Schafer on Monday and Tuesday afternoons at 2-5 pm. Or if that doesn’t work, you can join one of the UUJMCA/Reclaim Our Vote sessions on Sunday afternoons, 1-4 p.m. Read on for more info…

After her postcard-writing snowballed into organizing 100 people completing 22,171 postcards, Linda Henigin decided she has to bite the bullet and make phone calls:

I weigh the discomfort and inconvenience of making phone calls against the abject horror I would feel if the current administration were to be re-elected. I simply cannot wake up on November 4, or whenever we get the final results, and know that I could have done more to elect progressives up and down the ballot. I’ll take a little discomfort now over another bout of debilitating grief after the election.

Linda Henigin

Nancy Neff suddenly “got religion” about phone banking in September when an analysis said that to have a 98% chance of winning the presidency, the challenger would have to win the popular vote by 5-6%.

Given the continued revelations since then about the ruling party’s intentions to suppress voting, avoid counting all ballots, and challenge any result other than the current president prevailing, I am driven to try to get the popular vote well above 6%.  The most effective way to do that from California is phone banking, and I am convinced that Reclaim Our Vote has an excellent strategy and an easy way for volunteers to participate. 

Nancy Neff

Reclaim Our Vote in a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization doing voter education in voter suppression states.  Elsa Schafer has been an engaged leader with them for 3 years and is now part of their Election Protection Team.

“After 17 of us in the Bay Area made 41K calls in Fall of 2017, using the NAACP lists, to people the big Parties overlook, and 81K more African Americans voted in that one Senate run-off election than had voted in either of the Obama presidential elections, I realized Reclaim Our Vote and Founder Andrea Miller know what they’re doing — and I haven’t found a better way to spend my time than by alerting people of color that they’ve been taken off the voter rolls — disenfranchised — showing them via our 6.4 million postcards sent this year how to re-register — then using this phone banking to ask them to vote early — taking friends and family with them!”

Elsa Schafer

If you are ready to give it a try on your own:

  • Go to the main Reclaim Our Vote phonebank page here:   https://www.votinginformation.org/rovphonebankcentral
  • Follow the instructions, watch the 10-minute training video, and you’re off! 
  • Feel free to call/text me at 650-339-9540 with any questions.  Not sure what state to call?  Try Georgia.

If you want to attend a phone bank with other UUCPA members and friends and the option of starting off with a 30-45 minute training with Nancy Neff and Elsa Schafer, here is the info:

  • Topic: UUCPA/Reclaim Our Vote Phonebank Training/Calling
  • Time: Oct 20, 2020 02:00 PM
    • Every week on Tue through Oct and then on Mon Nov 2. 

Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.

Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/85336622571?pwd=ZWNXS2xVRnhTcThKU2wrb202L2xidz09

ALSO: Please join regular UUJMCA/Reclaim Our Vote