Making sure every American voter is registered and ready to vote this fall is Dems Abroad's #1 priority.
Person-to-person is the most effective way of reaching our members. And phones or online 'dialers' are our tools.
Democrats Abroad has a global calling system. Any member can get trained and certified to help. It's fun! It's rewarding to know you've helped elect the Democratic ticket.
Here in Greece, DAGR also uses local phones to reach our members around the country. It's a bit 'lower tech' but it works for us. It's also fun and rewarding. And it's set to start later this month (August).
You can volunteer for global calling or for talking to fellow Democrats here in Greece. Or you can do both. And after most DA members have put their ballots in the mail, there's still a stretch of 2 or 3 weeks when voters in the US are being called. We've got links to the Party and other allies who are phone-banking stateside.
Here's the DAGR Plan. Read on below – in the How Phone-Banking Grew and Grew section -- if you want more back-story on how this all fits together.
DAGR's Phone-Bank Plan for 2024
UOCAVA Ballot Drop Day is Sept. 21. On or before that day, states are required to send ballots to abroad voters, military and civilian. As all states will now send out blank ballots by email, DA recommends requesting they be sent by email. Otherwise, they’re sent by regular mail, which may cut two or more weeks off our time to return them.
Global DA is on this, and so are we! We’re leaving no stone unturned. We need every vote we can get to make sure the totally unqualified and dangerous ‘other candidate’ gets nowhere near the White House.
DAGR also wants every eligible American living in Greece – long-term or temporarily – to know they can vote!
Our current phone campaign is headed up by our Vice Chair Sarajane Leone, leading the volunteer recruitment and training, and Counsel Charity Moschopoulos, handling the technical side. Charity had shouldered both parts since 2016 and had been asking for help for yonks. Sarajane stepped in with her community-building skills and set up three regional team leaders. Randall Warner, Thessaloniki Chapter Chair, heads up the northern region. Past Country Chair Stacey Papaioannou has the Athens area. And Gina Billy, At-Large Rep, has those areas that don’t fit into a chapter catchment area. Each has their list of volunteers, trained now and starting on calls.
Charity took on dividing up the membership roll into call lists. Ideally, a list will have 20 to 30 names to call, so no one volunteer is overloaded.
As calling starts, volunteers, especially newer ones, may have questions. And here, the team leaders and Sarajane stand by to help.
A very short set of questions has been set up as a ‘form.’ When the volunteer notes a call in the form, Charity can pick it up and update the membership roll. If an address, phone, or email has changed since January, she can correct the information. Most of all, it’s important to tag the contact; that’s one of the ways we verify our members are still with us. That’s our end of verifying the vote, just as it’s up to the local boards of election back home to certify our votes in the election count.
Once the member is marked as having been reached, it will be noted in the global list so they aren’t called again. Note, though, there may be some overlap this time. Global volunteers began calling ‘hard to return’ members in mid-August, beginning with any who vote in states with ‘mail return only’ systems. Delays in the US mail instituted by Mr. Trump’s Postmaster pick, Louis DeJoy, can cause a late ballot to miss being counted.
The current campaign focuses on making sure every one of our members is registered, ready to receive their ballot on Ballot Drop day, September 21 and get it back to the US asap.
How Phone-Banking Grew and Grew
In our home-states, our friends and allies grab a clipboard and head out to that voter registration table at the mall. They knock on doors, talk to neighbors, pass out yard signs and bumper stickers. A few dress their pets in bunting and walk them downtown. You never know what voter you can persuade while they’re scratching Major’s ears.
Out here in abroad land, if we don’t hear English at the ATM machine, we could walk 20 Km before running into another American voter.
We have to use different strokes.
Those strokes used to call for a mimeograph machine and a sheet of postage stamps. A few country committees still do postcard campaigns, although the cost of physical mailing is becoming prohibitive in most places. But as Dems Abroad races to stay abreast of the rapidly changing Internet scene, we’ve learned to do website posts, bulk emails, webinars, chat groups and social media posts to reach most of our folks.
But our most effective version of door-knocking has been, and still is, ‘phone banking.’
In ‘the old days,’ we used to use our personal phones and a list of members. Then DA global discovered VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), also known as ‘some online phone-banking app.’
DA's Global Method
Dems Abroad uses one called CallHub. DNC and some of the state parties use HubDialler. There are others. These apps allow the volunteer to access one name at a time from a database. They can call using their computer’s microphone and talk to people almost like a real phone call. And there’s a ‘form’ … which looks like a script with checkboxes or blanks to fill in, to record the call and responses.
For fast calling of masses of members – with reminders to register, send back the ballot, etc – these VOIP apps are brilliant. Experienced callers can get in a lot of information, help voters move ahead, in a short phone contact.
The main problem with these huge VOIP platforms is that they cost money to use. We, the party, or Dems Abroad, in our case, have to raise the donations to pay the rental fee. That means callers are encouraged to keep the calls short. Just the facts, ma’am! Have you registered this year? Did you get your ballot? Have you sent it back? OK, bye now!
The Local Linguistics Problem
The other downside is that volunteers from all over the world may call in a convenient time zone. The ‘system’ selects the next number. That means someone in Japan may be calling a member in Greece. If an older relative, for example, is home during the day and answers the phone, they may not speak English. And hearing a volunteer who doesn’t speak Greek, they’ll slam down the receiver as a wrong number, “Αx, στο διαλό!” The volunteer may then record the call as ‘bad number.’ And the phone gets recorded as ‘bad’ in the member database.
Dems Abroad Greece began calling campaigns in, at least, 2010. From 2014 onwards, we began sorting our members by postal code. We tried to assign a calling list to a volunteer in that area, or with interest in that area. And to re-assign the same volunteer to the same area, so that relationships were formed. ‘Hi, remember me? I called you last January. Did you get your primary ballot?” Etc.
Our hope, from 2015 forward, was that we could form up ‘phone trees’ around those volunteers. They might even have some local house parties for an election watch, or form up a car pool for an event. And eventually, we’d have ‘precincts’ all over the country, joined up as chapters in addition to our two city chapters, Athens and Thessaloniki. That hope is still a glint in its father’s eye.
But with an active At-Large ‘chapter’ now approved, with our two At-Large reps on the ExCom heading up outreach, the idea edges closer to happening.
In the meantime, DA Greece has become the last hold-out from CallHub. With boodles of volunteers in over 55 countries and non-country committees, programming CallHub to produce individualized call lists for each of our volunteers was just a bridge too far for the IT team. (They’re volunteers, too! And doing a gargantuan job with all our worldwide DA communications platforms!)
The advantage, the up-side, of the DA Greece method is that we do, most of us, speak enough Greek to chat with the ‘older relative who answers the phone.’ We can and do talk to our members about how things are going in their area. Are you helping with Karnivali again this year? Overrun with tourists on your island? How are property prices in your area? Have the wildfires been brought under control?
We also, most of us, have flat rate calling deals of some kind. And for those who don’t, for the volunteers who work from limited contracts or ‘phone cards,’ DAGR can pitch in and buy a phone card that will cover 20 or 30 calls. We can stay on the phone a little longer, if the member has time, and actually talk about ‘real stuff.’
We’re – oh, you know – real people, in a real country, with real issues, AND concerns about how our American citizenship is actualized. We are fa-mi-ly, da da da!
And THAT is the most effective phone-banking there is!
Global or Local, Phone Banking Has Its Rewards
It’s rewarding for the volunteer. Our members are mostly – let’s say 95% -- delighted to hear from a fellow Dem Abroad in Greece. They’re busy working and raising families, but proud to be American citizens and happy someone is helping them do that to the fullest.
Whether DA Greece will keep on with the local calling scheme, or at some point give in to using the ‘almost but not quite as friendly’ CallHub random calling app, remains to be decided. CallHub volunteers will tell you they also get very positive feedback from the folks they talk to. But we’re thinking we get even more positive responses from fellow DA’s in Greece.
Meanwhile, DA Greece is running our local-member campaign, at least this one more time, throughout September, with a local, very Greek objective: Reach EVERY member. We’ll train volunteers .. experience not necessary. It’s a lot like picking up the phone and calling a friend!