Work Your Connections
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We humans thrive best within connected communities.
Let’s tap our connections to support and uplift our shared values.
While Team Coup seeks to divide us—literally—through voter suppression and gerrymandering, think about how we can use our spheres of influence to advance democracy.
Make your weekly routine a footprint of democracy.
Brainstorm every place where you intersect with other people who may share your pro-democracy values: Your workplace. Your school. Your local pizza shop. Your favorite neighborhood bar. Where you buy your groceries. The shelter for unhoused people where you volunteer. The bus or train you take to work.
How can your footprint advance the democratic process?
Can you ask the pizza shop owner to include voter registration forms in every box for delivery?
Can you spend part of your volunteer time at the food pantry helping clients ensure they’re registered to vote?
While you’re riding the bus, can you offer to help your fellow passengers register or request a vote-by-mail ballot?
What about your town’s government? Can you ask what they’re doing to ensure every citizen knows how to register and vote?
David Pepper, former Democratic party chair of Ohio, outlined this ingenious idea in his book Laboratories of Autocracy.
Watch the States: Authoritarian creep starts in our own state legislatures.
David Pepper’s latest book, Laboratories of Autocracy, expertly describes the assault on our democracy from within. For the past two decades, extremist right-wing politicians have imposed minority rule in multiple states by undermining democracy in statehouses across the United States. They intend to make themselves unaccountable to voters so they can lock in power for the long term. This book, by the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and a former county official, exposes the tactics being used in these authoritarian takeovers and illuminates strategies to overcome them.
It takes work. And some courage.
We get it. But if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to help someone register to vote for the first time, or felt the thrill of knowing you’ve personally empowered a voter who’s been purged from the rolls to reclaim this fundamental right, you’re missing out on something pretty incredible.
And when that corner store or neighborhood bar agrees to pass out registration forms to all their customers, thank them for being part of Team YOU and spreading the word.
