Getting out the vote, left to right: state Sen. Lena Taylor; Wisconsin Democratic Party volunteer Amani Latimer Buriss; and Arkesia Jackson, the Biden-Harris Statewide African American outreach director.
Sylvester Jackson will not be voting in the upcoming presidential election.
Instead, he will spend every possible moment over the next few days trying to energize people who can.
Jackson is a community organizer with the Milwaukee chapter of EXPO (Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing), where he has been busy educating community members about the importance of their vote and joining in discussions about the issues they care about most. Like many formerly incarcerated felons, he cannot vote because he is still on parole.
Lately Jackson has been focused on getting out the vote during Wisconsin’s early voting period, which started Oct. 20.
EXPO hosted a voting caravan Oct. 21 to kick off a week-long outreach initiative. At the event, volunteers and voters gathered in a meeting room inside of the Alma Center in Milwaukee where they talked about voting, decorated their cars with voting signs and balloons and shared a socially distanced breakfast. After breakfast, the volunteers left to drive people to the polls throughout Milwaukee County.
The organization is working hard to help break down any barriers to voting, whether voters lack transportation, are confused due to misinformation or simply lack confidence in the process. The caravan was meant to provide a community space where voters could ask any questions they had about the voting process and learn about available resources that aid voting access.
“We are having a lot of misunderstanding about how our votes don’t matter and we try to teach and educate the community that if your vote didn’t matter, then they wouldn’t be trying to come up with all these technical ways to keep us from the polls,” Jackson says in an interview, referring to efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict acceptable identification cards and minimize the early voting period, among other measures.
“Our power lies in our ability to vote,” Jackson says. “Using that power helps to hold leaders accountable.”
The caravan, says Jackson, was to specifically target areas in Milwaukee County that had low turnout in 2016. Around 490,000 voted in Milwaukee County in 2012, when President Barack Obama was on the ballot. Four years later, when Donald Trump faced off against Hillary Clinton, that number dropped to 441,000.
According to the Center for American Progress, turnout for Black voters dropped sharply statewide from 74 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2016 — a 19 percent decrease.
Efforts to reverse that trend have been a high priority among nonpartisan voting rights groups as well as both political parties this year.
Amani Latimer Burris, a volunteer with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, says voter suppression efforts that have affected communities of color have fueled those efforts.
“We’re exhausted and people are tired of not having enough places to vote, of the confusion of what is perceived as a block of their vote,” says Latimer. “There is a data-driven, concerted push to not turn out our community and we are trying to work against that.”
Milwaukee, which has the highest African-American voting population in the state, has been a significant target for get-out-the-vote efforts over the past few months.
Latimer Burris, who recently ran for a state Senate seat, launched the United Bus initiative this summer after her loss. Pushing the message “United in Our Differences,” volunteers drive the bus to different neighborhoods where they provide information to residents about the upcoming election and the candidates.
Latimer Burris says that she is doing this work to help remove the systemic barriers in the electoral process facing African Americans.
“I have two teenagers and a husband in Madison, but I’m down in Milwaukee for 30 days,” she explains. “Mama is down here for 30 days straight to try to make a difference.”
Isthmus contacted the Wisconsin Republican Party about their outreach efforts but received no response. In February, the party opened its “first-ever office in the heart of downtown Milwaukee,” according to the Associated Press. GOP leaders told the AP that the office would be the base for the “party’s minority outreach coordinator” and organize efforts to connect with Black and Hispanic residents in Milwaukee.
“We want to be a part of the community,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt told the AP at the time. “We want to make sure they know there is a choice.”
Frances Huntley Cooper, former Fitchburg mayor, says that she sees an energy among voters similar to what she saw when Barack Obama was on the ballot in 2008.
“With the Black Lives Matter movement we’ve seen a lot of people getting invested in politics,” she says. “People are saying enough is enough, but it’s still a long journey.”
Huntley-Cooper, who became Wisconsin’s first Black mayor when she was elected in 1991, says she gets frustrated with those who don’t see the value in voting. But in some cases, she adds, that is because no one has reached out to encourage or motivate them to cast a ballot.
“In part I think some of that is people forgetting where they came from, and they are not understanding the struggles of the people who came before us who fought for the right to vote,” she says.
Oprah Winfrey, for one, is doing her part to motivate people to cast a ballot. She made a virtual visit to the state as a part of her Own Your Vote Project, highlighting local Black sorority leaders for a conversation about issues that impact Black women and getting out the vote. And on Oct. 28, NAACP President Derrick Johnson and other national leaders hosted a webinar discussing the voter mobilization tactics and efforts to combat voter suppression in key battleground states.
In other outreach efforts, the Milwaukee Bucks launched their Vote 101 Series, a voter education initiative highlighting community voices, and collaborated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a voting project that showcased their respective mascots, Bango and Bucky.
The Milwaukee County Elections Commission has also partnered with local predominantly Black churches to provide curbside absentee ballot dropoff at houses of worship.
And Voces de la Frontera Action says in a news release that it is “working tirelessly to turn out the Latinx, Black and immigrant vote in Wisconsin” and has a network of 23,000 Latinx, Black, youth, immigrant, and pro-immigrant rural organizers in the state.
“A key battleground state, Wisconsin’s rapidly growing immigrant community could literally change the fate of this national election. Our voices must be heard,” the Voces de Frontera Action news release continued. “Our communities must vote. Trump must be defeated. Our communities of color are ravaged by Covid-19 and a specter of fear of racist harassment and mass deportation haunts us. Enough is enough, and now is the time for change.”
