Get Out Her Vote!

By Jeanine Plant, November 2, 2006

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Reprints
• Share

In South Dakota, polls are showing that outreach to young women is paying off -- and may block the anti-abortion ballot initiatives.

---

A special voting event held last week at Black Hills State University (BHSU) laid bare the fierce competition going on throughout South Dakota to sway Election Day votes on the measure that would continue the state-wide abortion ban.

It was the Genocide Awareness Project, an anti-abortion outfit sponsored by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, versus four part-time campus field organizers who are working closely with the BHSU / Spearfish NOW (National Organization for Women) Chapter and Feminist Campus, a nonpartisan pro-choice network of students around the globe.

And this midterm election season, Feminist Campus, a project of the Feminist Majority Foundation, is mobilizing hundreds of its members at campuses nationwide in a deeply inspired voter outreach program as part of the "Get Out Her Vote" campaign.

"We are working on a big voter registration drive," said Kate Neilson, an East Coast Organizer with Feminist Campus. "Only about 20 percent of 18-to 24-year-olds vote in midterm elections. It is such a difficult process to go through, and we want to take one step out of it for them."

For duVergne Gaines, the West Coast Campus Director of Feminist Campus, that step includes making it physically easier to get to the polls.

Since August, Gaines has spent five weeks canvassing at campuses all over South Dakota with her colleagues Jessie Raeder, Senior Campus Organizer, and Samantha Sewell, Primary Organizer for the Mid West Region. Together with a student-led campaign and feminist faculty support throughout the state, the Feminist Campus team helped organize "voting caravans" to county voting offices, facilitating over 500 early student votes (early voting in South Dakota began in late September), registered thousands of students to vote and secured over 2,500 student pledges to vote "no" to Referred Law 6, the proposition to continue South Dakota's abortion ban. Mary Foster, one of the field organizers at BHSU, also solicited a Lawrence County auditor to conduct early on-campus voting at BHSU for the November 7th election. But she and her colleagues were not alone in attempting to educate voters.

"It helped us to have the antis there. With their grisly images and propaganda, it bumped our numbers way up," Gaines said about the Genocide Awareness Project.

At the BHSU voting event, the Genocide Awareness Project put up posters of bloodied, purportedly aborted human fetuses alongside images from the Holocaust and the racist lynchings, making visceral appeals to passersby.

In stark contrast, Feminist Campus student organizers working in coalition with the local NOW chapter simply put up posters stating, "Vote No on Referred Law 6." And as a rule, Feminist Campus sticks to peaceful slogans and verbal tags, refusing to "escalate the violence," as one organizer put it, with a graphic component that could easily match anti-abortion activist's tactics with "images of women who have died from back-alley abortions."

Just the words -- "Stop Prop. 85" -- is one such banner that was used on October 30 at a rally organized by the FMLA at the University of Southern California (USC). Proposition 85 is essentially a reincarnation of a Proposition 73, the parental notification abortion initiative that failed to become law by a narrow margin last November in California. According to the Sacramento Bee, proponents argue that Proposition 85 is not about upsetting abortion rights, but about protecting the rights of parents.

But Sarah Lambeth, an intern with Feminist Campus and an organizer of USC's rally, is not convinced. Before a crowd on USC's main thoroughfare yesterday, Lambeth argued that "70 percent of teenagers involve their parents in their abortions, so it's the teenage girls who don't tell their parents who will take extreme measures." She also contended that the proposition was inherently sexist, "because it places all the blame on the female, whereas the father of the child does not have to notify anyone at all," and brought up the issue of the money trail. "Where does the money come from? It comes from members of a very extreme anti-choice organization," she says.

According to Healthvote.org, a California healthcare website, James Holman, publisher of the weekly San Diego Reader and a string of Catholic newspapers, has donated nearly three million dollars backing the proposition. And according to the website, "No On 85," a project of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, in the past, Jim Holman has been arrested for blocking access to abortion clinics, and has been a frequent anti-abortion sidewalk protestor.

To be fair, though, various California chapters of Planned Parenthood, the national sexual and reproductive healthcare centers, have more than matched his dollars in an "against" campaign; they've raised nearly 3.5 million dollars.

Throughout the rest of the country, Planned Parenthood and Feminist Campus have mobilized feminist students in other key states -- such as Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona, Washington, and Ohio -- in the effort to impact a whole host of issues affecting young people such as reproductive rights, affirmative action and the Iraq war.

The Feminist Campus chapter of Wright State University, located in Dayton, Ohio, led by student Rebecca Lawrence, will be canvassing all day Monday, November 6th, and will march to the Federal Building in downtown Dayton on November 7th.

Lawrence and others will be joined by Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF), who will be in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, most of Monday and Tuesday for a final pro-choice push. PPAF estimates that nearly 300 volunteers will be going door-to-door in Ohio to talk about why local races are pivotal in preventing abortion bans like the one in South Dakota.

And at least in South Dakota, all of this activism seems to be making a difference. Gaines giddily cited the Argus Leader Statewide Poll, a South-Dakotan newspaper, released on October 30th, that finds most South Dakotans would vote against the state's ban on almost all abortions. According to the report in the Argus Leader, 52 percent of voters polled would vote against the ban, while 42 percent would vote for it.

"More than anything, we want young people to vote," said Kassidy Johnson, the Primary Organizer for the Southern Region of Feminist Campus, who emphasized the focus on the gay marriage ban in Florida. "The south is not as progressive as others states, but if we can boost their [18-to-30-year olds] numbers, it's a turnaround."

Right now, Feminist Campus is focused primarily on the midterm elections, but for some November 8th is the big day.

The day after Election Day is the State University of New York at New Paltz's fourth annual "The F-Word" event, where Meg Waldron, the Feminist Campus leader there, "intends to 'Break Down Misconceptions of Feminism.'"

"We cover one wall of the room with stereotypes of feminists (bra-burner, lesbian, bitch)," Waldron wrote in an email. "[And] we have five speakers lined up (professors, students, alumnae) to speak about how they feel about these stereotypes on the wall, what feminism means to them, how they came into [it], and whatever else they feel will be effective for the cause."

Jeanine Plant is a frequent contributor to WireTap and a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York.