Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #8

If you’re not registered, you can’t Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote!

High school students register to vote during a voter registration event at their school in New Orleans last Wednesday. (Photo by Brett Duke)

(A daily series to counter the reporting that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate. They are not.)

One of the many reasons we stand poised to crush the movement which seeks to destroy our Democracy is that there are millions more of us who are registered to vote than there are of them. 

FACT: According to Ballotpedia, amongst 33 states and territories who let you affiliate with a party when you register to vote in the United States, there are currently 48 million registered Democrats vs. 36.4 million registered Republicans. 

There are also 35.3 million registered independents. And polls show that the majority of independents usually vote for the Democrat. As Business Insider reported, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, “Democrats had a 38%-35% edge among independents.”

So, we’re all set, right?

Well, not so fast. 

Unlike most democracies, we do not have one standard voter registration system for the whole country. 50 different states have 50 different sets of rules. If you have recently moved to a new state, if you go to college in a city different from where your parents’ home is, if you’re living in one state but working in another, if you are on the road, or if you have gone to help an ailing relative, or you are simply without a home or an address, there are numerous ways some states make it easy for you to register. And then there are the others who go out of their way to make it impossible for you to participate in the next election. So a lot of votes never get counted because the voter wasn’t registered properly and thus not allowed to vote. 

And it is these ridiculous and unjust hurdles that unduly affect the poor, the working poor, the young, the single moms, the recently evicted, those formerly incarcerated, various transients and those who haven’t voted in so long they don’t even know if they’re still registered. And if you don’t know how to navigate the often Byzantine system of voter do’s and don’ts (especially in the anti-Democracy red states), this is the moment — this week and next! — when our side loses thousands of potential voters because we aren’t helping them get registered to vote. 

So the purpose of this Substack today is to enlist you to TAKE ACTION! To pledge to be an ambassador of voter registration and convince just 5 Americans to sign up before voter registration closes in your state — which for some of you is THIS COMING WEEKEND! (I’m lookin’ at you Alaska, Rhode Island, and South Carolina! And another dozen or so of you are right on their heels…)

If, in fact, only half of you who are Americans and are reading this (so that’s half of the 700,000 of you) would commit to registering just 5 people, that would mean we’d have 1.75 million newly registered voters!

Here is all you need to assist the unregistered — regardless of what state your fellow Americans reside in:

Vote.gov

It’s a one-stop shop for voter registration information (and action!) for all 50 states, D.C. and U.S. territories. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still have to endure whatever rigmarole your state has in place (and in some states it may feel more like a fun house of horrors), but this site will give you a roadmap. Select North Carolina, for example, and here’s what you see:

So just go to your state’s page on Vote.gov, print out a dozen blank voter-registration forms and carry them with you every day along with a dozen stamped envelopes so you can mail them to your state elections office after she or he fills out the form. Or if they wanna do it online, have them pull out their device, go to Vote.gov and help them fill it out.

Finally, I know many of you are thinking as you’re reading this, “Mike — what about gerrymandering and voter suppression? The Republicans are going to win with their cheating ways!” 

OK, look — I’ll have none of that talk here on my Tsunami! Yes, some Republican states will make it harder for Black people to vote. That’s their commitment to the White Jesus they worship. But they were doing voter suppression against African Americans in 2020 — and who ended up being the group in that election who put Biden over the top? Black America!

Our best defense against these crooked voting antagonists is to turn out so many voters on our side it will be very hard for them to win in the midst of our tsunami of a landslide (I will deal with the elimination of gerrymandering and voter suppression in a future Substack essay). 

Let’s do this! I hereby appoint all of you Citizen Registrars! Let’s leave no voter behind! Let’s Roe the Vote!

---

** Comments on posts are limited to paid subscribers — but, not to worry, anyone can send me their opinions and thoughts by writing me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. **