In a world that was forced into the confines of a computer screen Zoom session for most of 2020, Voter Services was challenged to manage the activities we normally take for granted. No in-person registration, no Naturalization Ceremonies, nor Registration Training. What to do?
The team got creative. We produced sandwich boards with QR links to the registrar, so passersby could register without contact. Several of our members took those out into markets and places of business, and thus managed to register new voters and pass out voting information as well. We held a very successful Registration Training on August 15th, thanks to the aid and support of Taylor Melton from the DoE. We had over 50 in attendance via Zoom. We also sponsored two billboards in the Richmond area for the month of October, promoting Vote 411. Our High School Education program was further developed during the year and had a couple of trial runs. High school history and civics teachers are very interested in the program, and we look forward to next year when we can take this into the classrooms. Our newest effort was the development of “Voter Fact Sheets,” which were one page (double-sided) distillation of pertinent voter information. These got passed out by our sandwich board monitors, as well as sent to a wide list of other civic groups for distribution, most notably affordable housing units throughout the state. It was quite a challenge to keep the Fact Sheets up to date, as things changed so much this year, and voting by mail was new to so many of us. But we managed to live up to our core value of a well- educated voting public and will continue to produce Fact Sheets in the future.
All in all, the committee looks forward to being able to work with the public in-person in 2021, but we learned a great deal and created new ways of doing our job in response to the pandemic.