Fight to vote: the Georgia organizers who helped mobilize voters

Dear Fight to Vote readers,

Welcome back! I’m Sam Levine, the voting rights reporter here at Guardian US. I’ll be taking over this newsletter from the stalwart Ankita Rao.

After the attack on the US capitol last week it’s easy to forget that Georgia’s nationally-watched Senate runoff races were just a little over a week ago. While it’s difficult right now to think about anything other than what’s going on in Washington, I wanted to begin 2021 by looking at how democracy can work, rather than how it can fall apart. I saw this firsthand in Georgia, where grassroots groups organized to mobilize unlikely voters and worked to overcome severe voting barriers in Georgia, a state that has become an epicenter of voter suppression.

Methodical organizing

I spent the Monday before election day with canvassers from Georgia Stand-Up, one of several civic action groups that spent the weeks before the election getting out the vote. Our day began in a chilly church parking lot in Atlanta, where canvassers, equipped with Dunkin’ coffee and Bojangles chicken biscuits, quickly piled into vans, which were then dispatched into different neighborhoods.

I followed along with one group as they went into a neighborhood in Fairburn, just outside of Atlanta. In the silence of the morning, the organizers flew out of the van in groups of twos and threes and quickly, methodically covered different houses. Their goal that day was to knock on just over 6,000 doors, bringing their total across the state to just over 100,000.

‘So many people are not aware of simple voting information’