"When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. — You have to do something." — John Lewis

Election Protection 201: What To Do When Something Goes Wrong

Written by

Jade Smith

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About 5,100 people joined Indivisible’s Election Protection 201 training on August 26, the second half of the Hands Off Our Vote program. Where 101 was nuts and bolts, check your registration and make a plan to vote early, 201 is about what to do when something goes wrong. The recording is up:

Action Items

1. Download the toolkit. The Hands Off Our Vote Toolkit has the “what to do now” checklist, plus how to plan a local action and how to reach out to press. Read the now section this week, not in October.

2. Check your registration, then help someone else check theirs. Text VOTER to 59798 and reply with your state. Californians can verify their status with the Secretary of State. There is a ready-made toolkit for passing that along by text or social media, and a second one of election protection messages.

3. Vote early, and if you vote by mail, mail early. Every California voter gets a ballot in the mail. Get it back as soon as you can, or drop it at a drop box or vote center. Most sabotage gets saved for Election Day itself, so the more of us who have already voted, the smaller the target.

4. Learn the 100-foot rule before you need it. In California, Elections Code 18370 bars electioneering within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place, an elections official’s office, or an outdoor drop-off site. That is a rule about advocating for a candidate or measure, not a general ban on standing there, but know the number and check anything else with Ventura County Elections.

5. Build your call list now. Who would you actually phone if a polling place closed with two days’ notice? Local groups already doing voter protection, faith and business leaders, a reporter, county officials. Write it down while nothing is happening.

Rapid Response

Molly from Indivisible made the case plainly: half a dozen people outside a local elections office with a few signs, a few hours after something happens, does more than a bigger protest after the news cycle has moved on.

The kinds of things worth responding to:

  • Openly biased poll workers, or voter ID demanded unevenly
  • Misinformation about where, when, or how to vote
  • Aggressive voter roll purges, or polling places closed at the last minute
  • Election workers or local voter registration groups being targeted
  • Federal officials deployed at polling sites

What to do: document it on video if you can do so safely, notify local and national press, and tag Indivisible in anything you post so it can be coordinated and amplified. Report it to 866ourvote.org or 866-OUR-VOTE, which is tracking incidents and building the record for any legal follow-up.

One hard line from the training: violence or the threat of violence is never yours to handle. Call emergency services, get yourself safe, and document from safety.

Two principles worth carrying around. Center the people most affected and follow their lead, and check whether someone local is already on it before planning your own response. And stay alert without assuming doomsday: tens of thousands of election workers and volunteers have spent decades making sure people can vote.

The People Who Have Done This Before

The guest was Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who pointed out that almost nothing in the current playbook is new. Show me your papers, seized ballot boxes, officials who win and then cannot get the keys to the office: he and his co-founders watched all of it in Alabama’s black belt and the Mississippi Delta long before it was national news. What is new is the scale, and that the federal government is now on the wrong side of it. Familiar tactics mean the ways to counter them are familiar too, and there is a role in this for everyone, not just the seven battleground states. When something is stolen in Georgia, part of whether it stands is how the rest of the country responds.

He also named the line we have to walk in talking about it: get people appropriately afraid, but not so afraid they decide the system is rigged and there is no point fighting. “There is more of us than there is of them.”

ICE at the Polls

Real, but unlikely. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to rule it out, saying agents would be sent only if a “threat” arises, and nine state attorneys general have asked him to put a no-ICE-at-the-polls policy in writing. Sending immigration agents to polling places would violate federal and state law. The uncertainty is the point: it is meant to make Black and Latino voters think twice about showing up.

What Indivisible is asking people to do:

  • Confirm your registration at least a month out, not the week of
  • Plug into your local immigrant rapid response network
  • Vote early, so that if something goes sideways there is still time to fix it
  • Vote with other people, and arrange an escort through Ground Control if you want one
  • Carry your ID and registration card even in a state that does not require it, because Black and brown voters are far more likely to have their eligibility challenged
  • If you are challenged or harassed, do not take the bait. The people outside a polling place do not get to decide who votes. Call 866-OUR-VOTE and document everything.

Expect the “non-citizens voted” claim after the election. It is already being tested. In July, DHS claimed more than 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in four states, and named California as the largest at 190,832. States asked for the methodology and the actual list of names. DHS never provided either. Neighbors here will hear that number about California specifically. The research on disinformation is consistent: one real conversation with someone you know does more than a hundred perfect social media posts.

The Mail Ballot Fight Is Still Moving

This one changed three times in the week of the training, which is the most useful thing to know about it.

The Supreme Court lifted one injunction against Trump’s mail-voting executive order on Monday, August 24. Coverage made it sound like the Court had blessed the order. It had not: the ruling was procedural, about the timing of the lawsuit, and the Court said explicitly it was not addressing the plan’s legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

Then on August 26 a federal judge lifted the last nationwide block, and two days later she froze the Postal Service from implementing the rules while she weighs a permanent ban. Votebeat is tracking the status, and it has probably moved again by the time you read this.

Preparation, not panic. Do not overindex on any one day of it. Nothing has changed for you as a voter: if you are eligible to vote by mail, you still can. Mail it early or drop it off.

Ballot Curing

Every election, thousands of ballots get rejected over small mistakes, such as a signature in the wrong box on the envelope. Many states, California included, have a legal process for contacting those voters in time to fix it. That is called curing, and it runs on volunteers making phone calls in the days after an election. It is one of the highest-value things you can do, and the opportunities show up late. Watch for them.

If They Refuse to Concede

Indivisible is saying out loud that if the administration refuses to hand over power, the response is sustained mass mobilization: an ongoing in-person presence at a significant location until every vote is counted and the winners are seated. Not a two-hour march on a Saturday. Not something that ends on November 3.

That would be a rapid response, not a pre-planned event, so the ask right now is simply to be reachable. The commitment to nonviolence is firm, and the training made the case that it is strategic and not only moral: nonviolent movements are how this has actually been beaten elsewhere.

Resources From Both Trainings

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