This is Crowdsourcing Mornings! This post takes place every weekday morning and highlights one crowdsourcing project I liked from Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or other crowdsourcing websites.
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We all talk about fighting systemic racism — well, here’s one way to do it! Voter suppression is a carefully built system of legal provisions and extra-legal practices that exclude American citizens from our democracy because of their race and socioeconomic class. We must work to stop it, and the first step is to call it out and spread awareness. That’s the goal of our feature-length documentary, “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook”, which you can watch right now digitally.
The next step is where we need your help the most: to find and alert wrongly purged voters. Many of them African American and Latinx. Our democracy depends on it… and also on the generosity of the people like you willing to join in this fight. We want this campaign to be a grassroots movement, funded by small dollar donations, to combat voter suppression.
17 Million Americans were purged off the voter rolls between 2016-2018 — nearly 8% of the electorate. Some for the simple reason they moved across the street, or others because they hadn’t voted in the last two federal elections. Voter purges are more common in certain states, cities, counties, and with specific demographics. For example, the battleground state of Wisconsin removed a troubling 14%. We will implement our re-enfranchisement efforts in key states that have high purge rates, such as Wisconsin, Georgia, Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
WHY are voters purged? It is a dirty yet effective trick to sway elections. A flawed 1999 voter purge in Florida helped George W. Bush win the state in 2000 (Over 50,000 voters were purged–many of them African American and Latinx). Bush won Florida by a little more than 500 votes – out of almost 6 million votes cast. By winning Florida’s electoral votes, he then won the Presidency. In 2017, Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, purged 560,000 voters from the rolls right before he ran for Governor in 2018. He won by 55,000 votes over Stacey Abrams. Since the purge, 87,000 citizens have re-registered because they were wrongly removed.
In the next 3 months, we will target purged voters who are likely unaware they have lost their right to vote. Using sophisticated digital messaging we will alert purged voters that their voter registration is in jeopardy and give them the tools to re-register. While other voting rights groups are primarily focused on registering new voters, we will focus our outreach on those who already demonstrated a desire to vote but are unaware they have lost their right to do so.
As of August 4th, this project has raised $1,500 of their $50,000 goal. This project has 29 days left to raise the $50,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $5, you will get project updates. For a pledge of $20, you will get one mug. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2048621590/rigged-kickstarter-to-combat-voter-suppression?
