Voting rights organization calls on Tallahassee to help register voters in Georgia

By St. Clair Murraine

Outlook staff writer

Almost every day for the past month, leaders in the Big Bend Voting Rights Project have been sending out emails and other forms of communication encouraging Tallahassee residents to help register voters in Georgia.

The effort is geared to registers eligible residents of Decatur, Grady and Thomas counties. The group has also taken the 80-minute trip to Valdosta last week. The canvassing generally takes place from 4 to 6 p.m.

The campaign will end on Dec. 7, the deadline for registering to vote in a Jan. 5 runoff election for two Senate seats. Early voting begins Dec. 14. Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff are in one race, while Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler face off with Democrat Raphael Warnock in the other.

The decision to register voters was prompted by the importance of the runoff, said former Leon County Commissioner Bob Rackleff, who has been heading up the daily treks across the state line.

He said they are working in areas that are often overlooked when it comes to registering voters. Many of those areas are predominantly Black.

The Voting Rights Project conducted a similar campaign to register voters in Leon and surrounding counties leading up to the Nov. 3 election. The group registered 1,030 voters over an 18-month period.

So far, the group is averaging about three registrations for each trip it takes to Georgia. They were hoping for larger numbers in Valdosta because of the population of the area.

“We go to every house and we knock on every door,” Rackleff said. “We ask people if they’re registered to vote. If they say yes, we look at the list of registered voters we have for that neighborhood.”

One of the common discoveries that the canvassers have made is that names and addresses don’t always match up. Another is name changes such as when someone gets marries, he said.

However, it’s a situation that the group is always prepared for.

 “It’s very simple,” Rackleff said. “We fill out the form and there is a little box that you check for change of status.” 

While Blacks tend to vote Democratic, Rackleff said his organization is non-partisan. 

“We deliberately go after the most marginalized people in our society,” Rackleff said. “Poor Black citizens don’t have access to the means of communication that we do; they don’t read newspaper. They don’t watch TV news so they don’t know about these things.”

Rackleff said larger groups are also registering voters in the metro areas of Georgia. Some are also getting assistance from Democrats in North Florida in support of Warnock and Ossoff.

The race for the Senate seats have become a heated contest primarily because president-elect Joe Biden flipped the state from Republican to Democrat in the presidential race. A win by the Democrats would also give the party control of the Senate with vice president-elect Kamala Harris being the tie-breaking vote.

Republicans have stepped up support for Purdue and Loeffler, with President Donald Trump expected to campaign for them this week.

At the same time, John Hendrick, chair man of the Leon County Democrat Party, has called on party members to help the campaign. Without the two Democrats in the Senate, Biden could expect Republicans to block his progress the way they did during Barack Obama’s second term, Hendrick said.

Electing Democrats is “going to make it much easier to get what president-elect Joe Biden and vice president-elect Harris want done,” he said.