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Ellen Gustafsson knows the country is polarized and the rhetoric is red hot. But in her politically diverse community of veterans and her spouse, it doesn’t matter.
“Military spouses I follow on Instagram…there are a lot of things people say they disagree with politically,” she says. This is not my enemy, just in case, this is who I call when I need someone to pick up my kids.”
With threats to poll workers exacerbating an already dire volunteer shortage, Gustafsson decided her community of fellow veterans would be ideal to help. Co-founded Vet the Vote, a campaign to get veterans and military families back into voting. She believes veterans have great experience in one important area of her life. It’s about following rules and procedures.
“The military and voting are two examples of how great bureaucracy can be,” she says. “You know, when so many people are working for her one big agency and they can’t do a certain job, that’s great for voting and keeping Navy ships.”
So far, the group has enrolled more than 63,000 volunteers nationwide.
Veterans are signing up for many reasons. Andrew Turner, an Iraqi veteran of Michigan, says the plan was to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
“It’s scary,” he says. “Government Whitmer was targeted for kidnapping, January 6th, and everything else, and I’m very upset because I’m seeing something I never thought was going to happen here in the United States.”
Turner has witnessed political violence abroad and wants to do whatever he can to strengthen democracy at home.
In Northern California, Donnie Hasseltine agrees. He served in the Marine Corps for his 22 years.
“From someone who was actually in Iraq during the Iraqi election, someone is threatening one of the poll workers, so it’s hard to imagine that you’re back in the United States and there are no poll workers. , I have no problem dealing with it.And maybe there is another way for me to continue serving and give back to my country.He might have the confidence to ease it. I can’t.
Some Vet the Vote volunteers have already participated in the primaries, and many say that checks and balances have increased their confidence in the system.
“It felt like launching a nuclear missile or opening SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility]says Joe Plenzler, retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and spokesman for Vet the Vote.
“The honesty between the two parties, the amount of tamper-proof tape and cords and locks. I’m a natural skeptic and I walked out of there with amazing confidence in my county’s ability to run. Election. ” he says.
It was also encouraging to work with veterans with different political beliefs, says Jerry Bell, who spent 20 years with Naval Intelligence. She has already participated in her first election in 2020 near her home in Calvert County, Maryland.
“Election administrators pair Republicans with Democrats. And my partner and I from the other party looked at each other sideways for about 30 seconds and started processing the ballots, but that didn’t matter.” “We had work to do, and it was the most partisan thing I’ve done since I left the Navy. It was It was a pleasure.”
Some veterans joined the campaign because they had questions about the process.
William Doyle served in the Navy from 2002 to 2017, deploying to the aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS George HW Bush. But Doyle says he never voted for president until he left the military.
“I didn’t want to have any sort of opinion on the Commander-in-Chief. You know, prejudice if my party I voted for doesn’t get elected,” Doyle said.
Since the 2020 election, he has been shaken by news reports and documentaries about voter fraud.
“I want to believe that our democracy is upheld and people’s rights are upheld. And our votes, all votes count. But the media is pointing the other way.” I sometimes see the
Doyle lives in Virginia Beach, not far from Vet the Vote’s Ellen Gustafson. She says she welcomes the efforts of this kind of skeptic. She is confident he will reassure himself and others when he finds out how the polling stations are operating. . There are too many volunteers at polling stations. This is a good problem, he says Gustafson.
“There were 12 zip codes we saw in our database alone. When you go to vote, you can trust that population is there and they know how to do the right thing,” Gustafsson said.
Copyright 2022 NPR. For more information, please visit https://www.npr.org.
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