CULTIVATING COMPASSION
Voting As an Act of Resistance: Why Voter Engagement Might Be the Most Important Thing You Do This Year
BY BRENDA MURPHREE
— Save Us from the SAVE Act! — A Note From Brenda: Just as we were going to press, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the most restrictive voter bill in modern American history. The so-called SAVE America Act requires documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or original birth certificate, and a photo ID, all matching the voter’s current legal name, in order to vote. The bill passed the House along party lines on February 11 by a vote of 218-213. It is currently sitting with the Senate waiting for a vote. The Brennan Center estimates more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to these documents. Roughly half of all Americans don’t have a passport, millions lack access to paper copies of their birth certificates, and millions of women who changed their names after marriage don’t have their current legal names on either document. This bill would also: • Eliminate online voter registration in 42 states • Threaten volunteer election workers with criminal charges if they make a mistake • Create a national database of voters’ personal information…. con - trolled by Trump Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and we already have checks in place to prevent noncitizens from voting. The actual result of the SAVE America Act is to make it harder for certain citizens to vote, disproportionately harming low-income, rural, disabled, and marginalized voters, as well as millions of married women. The obvi - ous intent is to restrict who gets to vote. Trump has threatened to cancel elections and to send ICE agents to polling sites, although the Constitution does not allow the first and we have clear laws in place prohibiting the second. What he is doing, however, is far messier and more widespread: Sow chaos and fear and confusion, undermine election security, and make it harder for Amer - icans to vote. We must not let that happen. See the “What You Can Do” section at the end of this ar- ticle for immediate steps you can take to help save us from the SAVE Act! # # # It all started innocently enough. We had stayed up long past mid- night, waiting for news outlets to make the call. One o’clock. Two o’clock. When the stunned announcers finally said it out loud, when we heard that an uninformed narcissist with no experience had won the presidential election, someone with no knowledge of government or politics, and no apparent discomfort about his ignorance (“It’s as if he’s missing an embarrassment gene,” one journalist noted in aston - ishment during the first debate), I stumbled out of the living room, fell backwards onto the guest room bed, arms splayed in exhaustion. “It’s impossible,” I heard myself saying. “It can’t be. I’ve got to do something!” Two days later, I knew what that something would be. Five days later, I held the first meeting. There were three of us. A few weeks later, there were 11 and, by the next meeting, 16. By the time we put out word for a public meeting the first of February, 2017, nearly 500
showed up. By then we had a name — Indivisible Asheville/WNC, tak - en from the Google doc “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda” that we had found circulating online. We pulled together a Facebook page, a website, an Action Network account, and soon we were putting out calls to action around cabinet confirmations and legislative activity. I was doing something. It’s All About the Numbers After two busy years of rallies, programs, events and other actions, all channeled through our initial focus on advocacy and accountabili- ty, in the summer of 2019 we added a third arm to our mission: voter outreach and engagement. We had seen the numbers, and they were shocking. In an evenly divided purple state like North Carolina, elec- tions at all levels are often decided by a small number of votes. In a 2019 special election for the state’s 9th Congressional District, Repub - lican Dan Bishop won by less than 4,000 votes. In one of that district’s eight counties, over 650,000 registered voters didn’t vote. We jumped into 2020 with a multi-pronged voter outreach and en - gagement program: door-to-door canvassing, using a modified deep canvassing approach to engage with low-likelihood voters; voter reg- istration tabling, meeting folks at child care centers, apartment com- plexes, community gatherings, neighborhood parks and community centers; a relational organizing program, training volunteers to reach voters in their personal networks; and vote tripling outreach to voters at the polls (“Thanks for voting! Could you stop and text three friends to make sure they vote?”). After COVID hit, we shifted to “virtual can - vassing” (phone-banking) and provided trained volunteers with vot - er lists and materials to do one-on-one canvassing on their own. The result? Even in the midst of the pandemic, we contacted over 4,000 sporadic voters right here in our community, doing our part to bring our county’s turnout to a record high of 81.33%. Since then we’ve continued to expand our voter outreach and en - gagement activities. In 2024 we took the lead in organizing a coalition of nonprofits committed to voting. And now, in 2026, with seven orga - nizational partners and growing, the WNC Votes! Nonpartisan Voter Brenda Murphree leading a planning session for the WNC Votes! voter outreach coali- tion in Western North Carolina.
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PATHWAYS—Spring 26—9
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