Jumping Into Georgia Politics With My Son

Blog # 13

My son and I infiltrated Georgia for the January 2021 Senate runoff races, and we experienced a bit of an eye opener, to say the least.

Soon after the November 3, 2020, elections, Lucas and I knew what we had to do. We wanted to be part of this important moment in U.S. history coming up in two months. Lucas, 21 and a senior at Virginia Tech university, has aspirations to go into politics and campaign management for a future career, along with an interest in fighting racial and other injustices. I knew that the opportunity to go to Georgia for the Senate runoffs in January would give him a front-row seat to democracy. I’d been involved in various progressive causes, liberal advocacy work, and Democratic campaign volunteering for years. Now I had a chance to do this together with my son.

We watched “Suppressed,” a documentary available on YouTube about Stacey Abrams, her phenomenal advocacy work, and the voter suppression and disenfranchisement historically present in Georgia. We did more research on the current electoral situation in Georgia, and the past corruption and racism there, but we were encouraged by Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state. Fired up, we tried to get in contact with Abrams’ organization, Fair Fight, to see how we could get involved in person, but they were not taking volunteers from out of state. We continued to look for ways we could jump in to help in Georgia, even though neither of us had ever set foot in the state. We weren’t going to give up though.

First, we signed up with the Jon Ossoff campaign to help canvass door to door in Georgia for him and Raphael Warnock. We didn’t mention that we were from out of state. I just signed up online for some volunteer time slots that were available. Then, Lucas registered as a Democratic poll watcher, a 14-hour job on election day, January 5, 2021. I didn’t think I could handle that type of work for an entire long day, so I looked elsewhere to help out, and eventually I signed up to be a driver for “Rides to the Runoffs.”

I bought us plane tickets to Atlanta, reserved a rental car, and booked motel rooms near the places we would be working. We got KN95 masks to protect us and the people in Georgia whom I might be driving during the second COVID wave, which was in full force. We were ready.

The Democratic Party of Georgia assigned Lucas as an official poll watcher to Precinct 97-2, which was in the Washington County Recreation Department building in Sandersville, GA, a rural area a little over a 2-hour drive east of Atlanta. He received his documentation in advance, printed it out, and packed it in his suitcase. Then we got our assignments for canvassing for the two Democratic candidates, and that would be in Greene County, also east of Atlanta. For Rides to the Runoffs, my driving routes would be in the Atlanta area. So we would be putting a lot of miles on that rental car.

Lucas and I flew into the Atlanta airport on Sunday, January 3, picked up our car, and then drove to a park in Greensboro, GA, where the canvassing materials and instructions were handed out. We planned two days of canvassing at the homes of likely Democrats, to “get the vote out.” Our online training module had given us the required procedure: Wearing face masks, we were to approach the doors of people on our assigned list (supplied by the mobile app “MiniVAN”). We would stick a Warnock-Ossoff pamphlet on each voter’s front door, knock or ring the bell, and then step at least 6 feet back. When the door opened, we would greet them by the names provided in our app, remind them of the impending election, and answer any questions they might have about the candidates or their polling location. We didn’t plan to tell anybody that we were from outside of Georgia. We had read up on the policies of each candidate so we would appear knowledgeable about Georgia politics.

This was Lucas’s first time canvassing for the Democrats, and he picked it up right away, with lots of enthusiasm and humor. Almost every door that we knocked on in this remote country area belonged to a Black individual or family, and they mostly all were friendly and receptive. The two times a white person answered, it was because the original occupant had moved on or had died. Those rural white people were not friendly to strangers knocking on their door for the Democrats. One stated she was a Republican and shut the door.

After two days of doing our canvassing along the dusty highways of Greene County and in the slightly rundown garden apartment complexes off the main roads, we came to the conclusion that the Black citizens were mostly interested and grateful that we had bothered to come to their doors, and in some cases we definitely reminded them to vote. If we hadn’t been there chatting them up that week, they may not have gone out on Tuesday to their polls, so it felt really good to do this. Lucas enjoyed chatting with these locals, and we rarely had to reveal that we were out-of-towners. It didn’t much matter to them, anyway.

Two little anecdotes that we got a kick out of: First, we approached some people sitting outside on a bench in their large, rambling apartment complex, and we asked for help finding a few addresses we couldn’t locate. We offered them our campaign lit, and they all took it. On our way back out to the parking lot later, in the distance Lucas could see one of the women bopping an older man on the head with one of the pamphlets we’d handed out. “You’d better go vote, man!” he could hear her shouting. We laughed at that and were glad we had gotten through to them.

Second, we went to a row of small, old, faded houses on the day before the election. At one of them, an older Black woman, looking quite unable to get up off her living room couch, was sitting at the end of it right by the old screen door. She listened to us through the door without rising from her sofa, as Lucas went through his spiel and offered her our Ossoff-Warnock lit. At the end, she didn’t say much, except for this: “Boy, get me my mail.” Right next to the three steps we were standing on was a rickety old mailbox. I immediately grabbed the mail out of it and handed it to Lucas, who, fully masked, gave it to the woman. We walked away feeling productive and chuckling at the moment.

At the end of the second day in that area, we decided we loved the African Americans of Greene County — the white people we encountered, not so much.

We were ready to drive to the next county and the town of Sandersville to check into the Quality Inn near Lucas’s assigned precinct, where he needed to be at 6 a.m. the next day. On the way we located a Wal-Mart to get him snacks and a large Gatorade and a canvas bag to carry them in for his long day on Tuesday. He also bought a cord for his rechargeable battery pack. He would need his cell phone to work for the entire long shift, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., so that he could upload polling data and information throughout the day.

Before dawn, I drove Lucas to the voting precinct, while he reviewed the poll watcher’s documentation and instructions and attached his official badge to the front pocket of his flannel shirt. I was going to leave him for the entire day so I could drive later to Atlanta to be ready to give people rides to the polls. It was dark and the place was empty when I dropped him off. I left him standing in the cold parking lot while connecting to the Internet with his phone app to later upload poll data and communicate with his Democratic group contact. He had to wait outside until the precinct opened at 7 a.m. I left to go back to the Quality Inn, not expecting there to be any issues.

Some time later while I was at the hotel, I got a call from Lucas telling me there was a problem. He said that after he went inside the building to make contact with the poll manager, he showed her his official letter of designation for that precinct and the poll watcher badge that signified he was a credentialed poll watcher. “She told me she never received any paperwork declaring that I can be there and said unless she gets it, I will be removed by security,” he told me.

I was panicked, and upset. I never had thought that they wouldn’t let him in. He had done everything right and secured all his documentation in advance. Now what were we going to do?

Lucas was only 21 and was encountering several unfriendly, middle-aged, small-town women who all knew each other. This was the first time he’d ever done anything like this, he was in a strange place, and we knew nobody there. What recourse would we have if they didn’t let him in? We had flown all this way expecting that it would work out, and now he was being denied entrance to the place he was assigned to watch. My momma bear hackles were rising. While he tried to deal with the issue, I called some relatives looking for advice. But it was getting resolved without me.

As Lucas explained it, “I reached out to the Democratic Party of Georgia contact who sent me, and they said that my paperwork was sent 6 days prior, to the general board of elections who oversees Washington County. I knew something wasn’t adding up, so I called Cathy L. Hagans, the director of elections who was responsible for sending my paperwork to my precinct poll manager. While on the phone with her, I explained the situation and the fact that my paperwork was sent December 30. She said it never happened and she’s been through all her emails and doesn’t see it, and then hung up. I reached out again to the DPG and they responded, ‘That is a genuine lie; I am looking at her email response right now.’ ” Grrrrr, I was so angry at this treatment of him.

He continued, “Seemingly out of options, I just waited outside and was limited to only monitoring the poll-line wait time until something changed. Which was still pretty important as the DPG wanted to keep tabs on all wait times. It wasn’t until 9:10 — two hours and 10 minutes after I made initial contact with the poll manager and when the polls opened — that I was told I could come inside. I was given no reason to why they changed their mind.”

Lucas was the only Democratic poll watcher that day. There was supposed to be another person scheduled with him, but he had learned the night before that that person had just been diagnosed with COVID and there would be no replacement. So it was just Lucas looking out for the Democrats and a fair election at that site. When he was finally allowed inside the building, he saw that there were plenty of Republican poll watchers, and they were all in “good spirits” and friendly with the workers at that precinct. Obviously, everybody there but him was for the other side. And they almost managed to keep him out.

Although he got a chilly reception from many there, he was kept busy and happy with his tasks. His assignments included the following:

• Confirming there was an ample amount of check-in computers, poll workers, ballot-marking devices, and ballot scanners and that the provisional ballot station was set up by 7 a.m. (not able to check because of his early-morning shutout)

• Monitoring poll-line waiting times

• Ensuring that the voting station was wheelchair accessible.

• Notifying DPG if he saw any source of voter intimidation

• Ensuring that provisional voters were aware of their responsibility to follow up within the week with their photo ID and confirmed address showing they live within the precinct or county

• Notifying DPG of the time that polls closed, as well as if they closed early and potentially cut off any voters from voting despite arriving before 7 p.m.

• Photographing the final results printout and a recap tally of the provisional ballots from the day.

I asked Lucas later if he had been nervous while handling this job all by himself, as the only Democrat there, against the odds among the small-town, all-GOP group of officials. “Only at the beginning,” he says, “because they wouldn’t let me be there and the director of elections lied, which barred me from entering for two hours. In those two hours I was nervous as there was no one inside to defend voters and aid them in the event of their right to vote being denied. If I was there, I could give them the voter protection phone line to call and provide them with the next steps they should take to ensure their vote gets counted.”

So who knows what may have happened in the two-plus hours that he was barred from working inside.

As we had experienced in our door-to-door canvassing, Lucas noticed that the Black voters who came into the precinct were friendly to him, more so than the white locals. He also says that most of the voters who were greeted by the people running the election were white country folk without face masks. Luckily Lucas wore his KN95 mask the entire time inside. There’s a reason Georgia’s virus numbers and casualties are growing, as they are pretty slack there about COVID precautions. I noticed maskless behavior everywhere we went when in the rural parts of the state.

At the end of the day, Lucas got to collect the final votes for his precinct and upload the numbers to his DPG app:

• Ossoff, 498; Perdue, 460

• Warnock, 498; Loeffler, 460

Yes! Despite all efforts to keep the sole Democratic poll watcher out, this precinct came through with the Democrats each winning by 38 votes. We are pretty sure it was the Black citizens coming in to vote who gave Ossoff and Warnock their victories.

We are happy we got to be a part of this historic moment in our electoral process, despite a few hiccups at the rural polling site, which are unfortunately consistent with what I had always heard about Georgia.

When I asked Lucas what he got out of this experience, he said, “Even though I didn’t see any oddities when I was inside my polling location, being there and providing up-to-date evidence signifying that it’s running smoothly meant that the DPG could focus on and address issues that other polling locations may have faced.”

And in the very end, Warnock and Ossoff won their races! So it was a successful and rewarding experience for both of us to slip into the state of Georgia and quietly help to bring this about. I’m so proud of my son. And fortunately, we did not contract COVID.

A last comment from Lucas: “The importance of unity in social movements is that having as many people volunteer for the cause as possible is the best way to ensure progress moving forward.”

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