Events

Local Option #1: “Turn Out the Vote Thursdays” 

For the past three years, we’ve had many many dedicated people joining in. In 2022, we had 100+ volunteers who attended at least once to eat, drink, chat, and pitch in together to help our Democratic candidates win; many attended almost every week!

There’ll be lots of different ways to help over the next few months; do what’s most comfortable for you! For example:

• Writing postcards and making follow-up phone calls to newly-registered voters. That combination has been very successful, resulting in this group voting at a consistent 75-80% rate in 2021-2023.

• Distributing “walk sheet” name and address lists of Dem-leaning people for our campaign canvassers to visit.

• Sending some specific issue-message postcards (a new idea we’re considering).

• Writing postcards and phoning people we’ve previously registered.
• Writing postcards and phoning for campaigns near Charlottesville.

If you’ve joined us before, please join us again. If you haven’t tried it yet, come on down and meet fellow Dems and enjoy yourself while working for a big win on November 7!

Questions? Please contact Mary Ann Harris: harrisma49@gmail.com

 

 

Local Option #2: Canvassing

We’re partnering with the Albemarle Dems to ensure we win all our local races; with several uncontested City races, it makes sense to shift some of our energy.

• State Senate: Incumbent Senator Creigh Deeds is favored to win our crucial Senate District 11, but the district has some very conservative areas, and we can’t be complacent if we’re going to keep this seat. His opponent, Philip Hamilton, is quite a piece of work; among other claims to fame, he’s publicly misgendered his own 12-year-old, claiming that school teachers had poisoned his child’s mind into being non-binary. And he favors schools outing gay students to their parents (see below in “Preaching Beyond the Choir”). This is not someone we want representing us; please donate to or canvass for (or both) the Deeds campaign!

• House of Delegates: Amy Laufer (our Albemarle County neighbor running in a competitive District #55 race, recently endorsed by Gabby Giffords’s Gun Safety PAC) and Katrina Callsen (running unopposed in our District #54).

• Charlottesville City Council: Natalie Oschrin, Michael Payne, and Lloyd Snook (running unopposed).

• Charlottesville School Board: Amanda Burns, Shymora Cooper, Chris Meyer, and Nicole Richardson (four candidates running unopposed for four open seats).

• Albemarle County Board of Supervisors: Bea LaPisto-Kirtley, Ann Mallek, and Michael Pruitt.

• Albemarle County School Board (ACSB): Rebecca Berlin, Judy Le, Ellen Moore Osborne, and Allison Spillman. A few notes about Allison’s race: she’s running against Meg Scalia Bryce, the daughter of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia-Bryce is (a) very concerned that the ACSB has been treating LGBTQ kids with respect and support, and (b) is very offended by its anti-racist curriculum. Scalia-Bryce has been winning the fundraising race by a wide margin, and we can’t let extremists like her (e.g. a fan of the Moms for Liberty book banners) start taking over our local schools (per Forward Albemarle, all her kids attend private schools). Please help Allison’s campaign any way you can, especially via donations and canvassing help.

If you’d like to canvass locally (it takes about 3 hours):

1. On a weekday, please email karencombs6522@gmail.com.
2. On a weekend, use SignUp Genius to participate in one or more of these coordinated canvasses:

Combs’ Office map  Mudhouse Crozet map yellow=Weekends of Action emphasis

Please tell your friends and social media connections how important it is to vote (and maybe even volunteer!); we need to hit high vote counts in our area to offset more conservative areas!

Option #3 Non-local: Help Key VA Races with Time and/or Cash

Republicans control the House of Delegates and the Governor’s mansion, and Dems barely hold the Senate; if Republicans take the Senate, then Virginia will become Florida, which means forced childbirth laws, schools teaching whitewashed history, “don’t-say-gay” laws, and other measures to erase LGBTQ youth…we can’t let this happen!

Today we’re highlighting Schuyler VanValkenburg’s important race trying to flip SD16 (just an hour’s drive from us!) from red to blue, which would be a very big win. Schuyler is a high school Civics and Government teacher who’s been serving in the VA House for the past six years. He just held a great Charlottesville fundraiser with our own Senator Deeds, but his race is an expensive one and some added support from us could make the difference! Donate here.

 

 

Local Option #4: Help with Voter Registration

Our wonderful voter registration team, led by Suzanne Michels, is very active in the lead-up to Election Day: registering new voters (including those who’ve recently moved to or within our area), helping voters figure out where they can vote, and helping folks who need to have their voting rights restored file the necessary paperwork. At last week’s Ix Saturday Market they got 14 new signups (and Ix Saturday markets are not impacted by the Ix financial challenges you may have heard about).

There are few things more satisfying than signing up a new voter! You can visit this online signup form to see what dates we need people. We’d love to have more folks pitch in, and if you’re even a little bit of an extrovert, you’ll enjoy it! Or email suzemichels@gmail.com if you might be interested.

PS— we recently updated these pages on our website:

• Voter Registration and Voting Information
• Precinct Maps
• Upcoming Local Elections

Cville Dems Full Committee Meeting (9/26/2023 – DATE CHANGE)

https://cvilledems.org/events/6893/

The 5th Congressional District Democratic Committee’s annual regional blowout party is Saturday, Sept. 30, from 5-10pm in Lynchburg, and we’re all invited! The Committee just announced a great speakers lineup: Senator Creigh Deeds and Dr. Cameron Webb. The ActBlue ticket link is https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2023-extravaganza . For more information please contact 5thcdchair.va dems@gmail.com or phone 434-253-0824.

        

       

 

Our new head of Voter Protection, Jeremy Jones, is looking to expand the VoPro Team to not only cover all the Charlottesville precincts in November, but also hopefully to help out in some other key VA races across the state, so everyone who’s eligible to vote gets to do so.

Voter protection requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work, so there are many ways you can pitch in. The main three:

1. Observe polling place operations and use an online system to file reports of any problems with the State Democratic Party’s boiler room of lawyers ready to handle them. You don’t have to be a lawyer to do this! The only prerequisites are:

• Taking a 2-hour training session before Election Day (since it’s all about making sure the rules are followed, step #1 is having lawyers explain what the rules are!).

• On Election Day you must work either the entire long exhilarating day (5am to 8pm!) or a more moderately thrilling half-day shift, either 5am-1pm or Noon-8pm.

• Being able to keep your cool and speak diplomatically if any problem(s) should arise.

Two examples of issues last year’s team helped with:

• Explaining the new same-day registration and provisional voting rules to make sure that all such votes could be validated and counted.

• Dealing with a traffic accident in front of Tonsler Precinct that temporarily blocked voter access.

2. “Chase and cure” (remote work, flexible schedule over the six weeks of early voting) — after a bit of training, help voters fix problems with their mail-in absentee ballots so those ballots can be counted (e.g. when someone gives a PO Box mailing address rather than the required street address).

3. Help staff the Voter Protection Hotline (also remote) — answer problem report phone calls and then try to resolve those problems. This also requires training.

If you might be willing to get involved in these kinds of efforts, please contact Jeremy: hijeremyjones@gmail.com