3 minute read
Ballot Breakdown
INTRO BY AMANDA HAGGARD
In 2018, Tennessee ranked 49th in voter turnout. More than 70 percent of voters don’t turn out for most elections in the state. Voter registration rates for Tennesseans aren’t much better, typically hovering around 40th in the entire country. Tennessee might be a red state, but the fact is that most people aren’t making it to the polls to make decisions about who will represent them.
When musician Tristen Gaspadarek realized this after the 2016 election, she felt she needed to do something about it.
“I thought, well, nobody’s voting,” Gaspadarek said. “And, you know, my first time I didn’t know anybody on the ballot and I just said, ‘I’m going to vote for all the women.’ I realized it takes a lot of research to know anything about the people on the ballot.”
At first, she thought she’d work with some other people to register people to vote. She wanted to do it in a way that created ballot literacy and promoted voting as the cool and right thing to do. She hosted shows and urged people coming to see the bands to register to vote. Then Please Vote Nashville moved toward social media posts, where a group of about six people would write and post about all the candidates in a race.
“We were doing all this work, and it was kind of insane, it didn’t look pretty, but it was something,” Gaspadarek said.
She knew eventually she wanted to create a ballot breakdown that could work as a guide for voters going to the polls — something to make it easier for a working person to gather the information they needed to make a choice. Most people don’t have the 40 or more hours it would take to read article after article and come to a sense of the basics about a candidate. And while it seems like candidates would put a lot of information online about themselves, that’s not always the case.
This year, with all its tragedy and uncertainty, sped things up. Particularly after the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing protests this year, people started reaching out to Gaspadarek about needing to do something. Several people reached out and asked how they could help and what she needed to get a more exhaustive ballot breakdown done. Gaspadarek says people were searching for ways to feel engaged.
The ability to register voters has been diminished because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So Gaspadarek and her volunteers went to work creating a free PDF for voters for the first time. The volunteers, somewhat of a who’s who of local artists (Daniel Pujol, Erin Rae and more), wrote basic profiles of each candidate. Whether someone is a candidate 100 people will vote for 10,000, Please Vote Nashville wants to be able to show a voter something about that person. The ballot breakdown also gives a description of the office a person is voting for.
“So newspapers have to make news every single day, and they have to go into these specifics and follow the day-to-day of it all,” Gaspadarek says. “So a lot of what we’re doing is looking at all of the news articles, pulling the sources that they’ve written, and we’re aggregating it into a profile. It’s a short overview — an educational pamphlet — of all the information we could find.”
The ballot breakdown for the Nov. 3 election (See the following pages for a section of it.) is the second Please Vote Nashville has put together. About a dozen people volunteered to help with the first ballot breakdowns for social media, but this one utilized 27 volunteer writers and six editors.
“You can have any belief system and volunteer with Please Vote Nashville and it will never come into discussion on what you believe and what you want to do and how you vote,” Gaspadarek says. “We have a strong motto of no matter how you vote, please vote.”
