Young and Restless? Get Your Mail-In Ballot Now!

Today’s young need to vote to be heard, even as they are struggling to juggle everything from their entrance into adulthood, college, employment, relationships, and relocation. The pandemic has just made it all harder.

Voting by mail is the way to go in this pandemic, but US mail promises to be slow. You send a request by US mail for a mail-in ballot. It is processed. You receive and return the ballot by US mail. The process could take a month or more — if you are registered to vote and no questions are asked!

One bit of good news for those in many of the battleground states. You can request a mail-in ballot today— without citing any excuse — in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This week’s edited contribution @VijayViolet — a place for ideas — comes from Ranga, who says in his own words:

I am a big fan of voting by mail. Over the past few years my family and I have had nice voting sessions at home. We go through the ballots, discuss different candidates, and mark our own individual ballots. The discussions serve as a bonding exercise. It is like our own mini caucus. All of us forced to reexamine our views. At the end, we take a family picture for sharing. That is our little civic ceremony. Beats long lines at the polling booth any day, pandemic or not. You can do the same with your friends or family!

I wish for all young people to be heard, so I recently and enthusiastically signed up to volunteer for a day for NextGen America who use texts to encourage young voters to vote by mail. The coordinators used a slack channel as a forum for motivation and discussion with volunteers like me. To have a trusted level of indirection so that volunteers and their text recipients remain mutually anonymous, we used a web app. I sent texts to 3,669 anonymous Americans in North Carolina. The app is set up with an initial message and a small menu of reply options for responses. We characterized each response for subsequent contacts. Our replies were polite, regardless of the nature of responses. We removed the contacts of those who asked.

Do what the President and the First Lady just did: Ask for your mail-in ballot! Today.

A bit about me.

I hope to place a request for a mail-in ballot in US mail today.