More disgusting attempts to target groups of voters and deny them the right to vote:
Nearly a third of people whose citizenship and right to vote were questioned by Colorado’s secretary of state are actually U.S. citizens, election officials said Wednesday, prompting Democrats to question the motives behind the effort to clean up voting rolls as a tightly contested presidential election approaches.
Earlier this month, Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler sent letters to nearly 4,000 people questioning their citizenship as part of a plan to have them voluntarily withdraw or confirm their eligibility to vote.
State officials were able to run 1,400 of those names through a federal immigration database and found that more than 1,200 were U.S. citizens. Verification of the remaining names is still pending, but so far, the search hasn’t turned up any non-citizens registered to vote.
Martha Tierney, an attorney for the Colorado Democratic Party, told election officials during a meeting Wednesday that they were wasting their time on a small group of voters instead of focusing on ensuring a fair and accurate fall election.
“This is a witch hunt and you should be embarrassed that you’re going down this road,” she said.
Gessler’s office plans to release updated figures Thursday detailing how many of the 4,000 people responded directly to affirm their citizenship or withdraw their voter registration. He said no further action will be taken involving people who did not respond to the letters.
More than three-quarters of the letters went to Democrats and independent voters.
If you live in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in Colorado, in Florida, you are going to have to protect your right to vote from state officials who are seeking to deny you the right. I don’t know how much plainer I can make it.
I really can’t stress enough that you are on your own in the listed states. The Obama Justice Department has been the most aggressive on voter protection issues in my memory, but most of election law is state law. I’m going to repeat that again, because it’s the key to the whole thing. Most election law is state law. I wish it were different, but it’s not. We don’t have a lot of tools available in federal law to combat these sorts of suppression efforts.
My advice is this: go local. Call your county Board of Elections (or the equivalent) and ask if you are still registered to vote, what you are required to bring to vote a regular ballot (NOT a provisional ballot) and how you may qualify under any of the new requirements for voting. Get a name and then write that name down. If there’s a dispute you’ll need to know the name of the person who gave you the information. Be polite and remember that local career employees of these state agencies had absolutely nothing to do with the ALEC-written voter suppression laws.
Don’t give up until someone gives you an answer. The one and only advantage you have over these GOP state leaders and election officials is time. It will be too late on election day and there are no do-overs. Remember what happens if Pennsylvania’s election system falls apart. A Supreme Court Justice with a lifetime appointment will petulantly demand that you “get over it.”
An example: Governor Corbett and his political appointees and the Romney bundler he hired to do voter education in Pennsylvania issued a press release with great fanfare on their thrown-together, half-ass attempt to create and issue voter ID’s.
They’ve had months to address this obvious, documented problem but did absolutely nothing until they were sued, but they claim they’re ready now. This morning I called the Pennsylvania voter hotline to see how well the education effort was going:
Voter ID Hotline at 1-877-VotesPA (868-3772)
I got through the recorded message and hit the button to speak to a person and see if I could ask a specific question or two about how one might get the newly announced voter ID in Pennsylvania. It rang and rang and rang. I let it ring so long the call was disconnected.
This is what you get when lobbyists and their bought and paid for elected representatives push through a complete revamp of an election process immediately prior to a national election and then do NOTHING to educate people until those same state officials are hauled in front of a judge. You get hotlines that no one answers. So go local.
Violet
Dang, that is so discouraging. Thanks for keeping after all this, Kay.
How can those of us not living in one of those states help? I feel kind of useless in this regard where I am.
Wag
Of the initial 4000 voters who received letters questioning their citizenship, only 15% were registered Republicans. The remaining 85% were fairly evenly divided between Democrats and Indepentents.
BGinCHI
Kay, any idea whether the DOJ is going to intervene in any more of these cases? Does the state have to get sued for this to happen or can they review the law and get involved?
I’m surprised the Feds aren’t clamping down like crazy on this. Give ’em an inch…..
Kay
@Wag:
I’d love to know what they used to decide on those 4,000 names to target. Surnames?
patroclus
The Texas voter ID bill was apparently just overturned by the courts.
General Stuck
It all just makes me sick to my stomach, the anti democracy efforts by republicans, then they get up and tell us how much more patriotic they are than dems, and the like. It is willful subversion and not one thing other than that. We win some victories, but when the leg zone is flooded with GOP schemes to suppress the vote, it is hard to have it reversed in time that it doesn’t do any damage to the sanctified right to vote in this country. I am at the point where hate is beginning to seep into my soul for these people. And I hate them for making that spirit draining possible.
giltay
This is what confounds me about the US. In Canada, federal elections are run by a single national body under federal law. Only provincial and municipal elections are governed by provincial law (in accordance with the Constitution). I know there isn’t much you can do about it right now before the election, but having one set of rules for one office seems like such a no-brainer to me.
Rainey Day
Actually 1,200 out of 1,400 is 6/7, a lot more than the 1/3 quoted at the beginning of the post. That means most of the voters submitted to the federal database past muster; some of the rest could still be legitimate voters.
dedc79
Good news out of Texas at least, where in the same week, courts have struck down the redistricting plan and the voter id law. Texas is subject to increased federal scrutiny, though, since it’s covered by voting rights legislation dating back to the civil rights movement. States like Pennsylvania don’t get that kind of scrutiny.
quannlace
There’s no voter ID or other restrictions here in New Jersey, and I STILL checked to see if I was still registered. Can’t imagine how paranoid I’d be if I was living in one of those named States.
SiubhanDuinne
But good news, a federal court just struck down the new Texas voter ID law.
Edit: I see at least two commenters beat me to this news flash by mere moments!
Kay
@BGinCHI:
There’s this huge misunderstanding of the tools that the federal government has available to combat this. Election law is state law. The feds have the VRA, they have the HAVA, they have the US Constitutional amendments that apply to voting, but there’s this horrendous SCOTUS case, Crawford, that opened the door to wide abuse and it’s just hard as hell to get by it.
The letters themselves will suppress voting, because people are going to interpret them to mean they can’t vote. People are going to have to change their attitude towards this, and approach it adversarially. There is this right you have. It’s being questioned. Protect it. Fight back. Politely and calmly and legally, of course, but be persistent. A letter intended to scare you off from voting should mean an IMMEDIATE phone call to the Board of Elections (or equivalent). Get it straightened out. The onus is on THEM to prove you should be purged, not on you to plead innocence.
Face
I may just go galt before the elections. I have a sick sense that Obama will win re-election but the R’s will take the Senate and abolish the filibuster. Thus, 4 years of continuous veto’ing of 97% of whatever garbage those two bodies spew out. This thought gives me stomach aches, hence the desire to check out until the shit’s gone down.
Xenos
@giltay: Unfortunately the constitution gives control over voting to the individual states. This followed the existing practice, in the UK, of individual counties running their own election. Somehow Canada was able to break out of the practice.
Our constitution is damned difficult to change, which is often a good thing, but on the issue makes the matter unsolvable at the federal level.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@BGinCHI: Because, as Kay said, voting is generally a state issue. The Voting act gave some power to the government over states that were obviously discriminating. Otherwise, unless you can prove in two months to the Roberts and Kennedy that there is something wrong, there’s not much that can be done at the federal level.
ETA: If we had a progressive Supreme Court, this would probably be interpreted as violating the voting rights act, even if the state didn’t originally fall under the act.
japa21
So I assume if a person didn’t return the letter they would remain on the polls. Of course, this ignores the intimidation factor in just the sending of the letter itself.
So good to know the Republican Party believes in the principle of “Guilty until you prove yourself innocent.”
I spend a lot of time online reviewing letters to the editor in my local paper. The issue of Voter ID is brought up time and again. People just don’t see anything wrong with it because anybody can get an ID and everybody needs one anyway for other things, like opening a checking account, cashing checks, etc. On one level it sounds reasonable to a lot of people, specially suburbanites who have no inkling of what living in a city is like.
These people will challenge every argument, including all the convictions for voter fraud in MN. Of course, all those convictions were for felons voting and voter ID wouldn’t have made any difference.
I frequently throw in the statement, I will believe Republicans are serious about upholding the integrity of elections when they make sure there is equal access in terms of number of voting machines and when they are pushing to reduce opportunities for fraud in the counting of ballots by ensuring all machines have a paper trail, that people can review their vote with what is recorded, or even just go to paper ballots completely.
I have yet to have any from the right even respond to that challenge.
BGinCHI
@Kay: Thanks Kay. This is the key:
In our criminal justice system we operate on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” But with voting we have shifted to “guilty until proven innocent.” We have to get voting back to an inalienable right, or at least something as sacred as innocence in matters of justice for the individual.
I wish Maddow and others would take up this meme.
Why are voters assumed guilty?
Valdivia
I just have no words anymore.
In the meantime we get the swooning press ignoring this while they slobber over Ryan.
Original Lee
@Face: My mother is terrified Romney will win. She lives in a swing state and is bombarded by Romney ads every time she turns on the TV or radio or if she uses broadband internet at the library. It’s gotten so bad that I persuaded her to make an appointment with a therapist, who at least can determine whether or not she has anxiety or depression issues and maybe help her cope.
Punchy
Serious question– as batshit crazy as Texans have become, what are the odds that they actually follow through with the judge’s demands? That they will actually let people vote without ID?
Lib’rul Acktvest Jujez!
Kay
@BGinCHI:
Texas is a pre-clearance state (history of voter suppression against AA and Latinos), so they can use the VRA tools there. Pennsylvania and Colorado and Ohio are NOT pre-clearance states.
Bulworth
I trust the reason the phone wasn’t answered was because the dutiful party–I mean state officials–responsible for doing so have their hands full doing battle with the worst of the voter fraud rabble that stalk the streets night and day menacing true faithful Repub–I mean honest authentic citizens. /
Bulworth
Sorry I goofted up the quote thing again. The second paragraph is a continuation of Kay’s post.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Face: Unless Republicans fall apart so hard that they can’t retake it. Why don’t you go galt after the election instead. You might as well know why you’re having to boil your shoes for dinner.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
This is the single biggest news story of the current election cycle.
A major political party, one with a storied past and roots all the way back to before Lincoln, has gone all-in on Jim Crow era vote suppression. If they succeed, and if in doing so during this election cycle they obtain both the power to proceed even further next time and positive encouragement that doing so is with the bounds of acceptable behavior, then we are on a slippery slope towards the sort of democracy practiced in Putin’s Russia.
This should be a major election year story in all the national news outlets. Instead we have only a few local newspapers covering this story. And Kay. No insult intended, but Kay has a somewhat smaller microphone here than does somebody like say Brian Williams for example. That this story is not getting more airplay is a huge scandal in terms of the state of our news media, to the point where the latter are passive and complicit accomplices to what the Republicans are trying to do.
Mnemosyne
Even here in California, I had a problem at the polls in April when an exhausted poll worker misremembered what she had read on my sample ballot and thought she had mistakenly given me the wrong party’s ballot. I had to pull the sample ballot out of my pocket and show them that, no, I am a registered Democrat, so I was voting the right ballot.
I managed to throw in a joke that my grandmother would be turning over in her grave if I was registered Republican (I didn’t mention that it would be in happiness!), but if mistakes like that can happen in solidly blue Los Angeles County within solidly blue California, it can happen anywhere. It was an honest mistake on her part, but that wouldn’t make any provisional ballot they made me use magically a regular one.
Check everything about your registration this election, no matter where you are and make sure it’s 100 percent accurate. Make sure you know exactly what your precinct is and which table you’re supposed to go to. Check check check.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, I know people get annoyed by Aaron Sorkin, but if you can figure out a way to get independents and wavering Republicans to watch the last episode of “The Newsroom” for this season, he lays out a parade of Republican fail that is one of the most succinct summaries I’ve seen in the mass media. And he bookends it with the true story of Dorothy Cooper being denied a voter ID.
Kay
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I say this all the time, but it’s like feast after famine. This was ignored from 2005 (Indiana, Georgia, the first to fall) to this year.
To me, from my somewhat obsessive perspective, it’s everywhere now, which is wonderful.
I’m really pleased they just struck down Texas. The poor! The judges mentioned the poor! Like poor people have actual rights and shit!
The Other Chuck
@Mnemosyne: I’m a fire-breathing liberal, but even I get annoyed by Sorkin. It’s a great soap opera, great actors, and great polemic, but boy oh boy is it transparently polemic. The only time I really saw some nuance is when the black Santorum supporter aimed his verbal flamethrower at McEvoy. It’s not so much “balance” I want, just less obvious straw men.
pragmatism
@Kay: Hey Kay, did you ever know that you’re my hero? Seriously, you kick ass. Keep up the good work.
Lost in America
My thought is I think it’s worth learning the laws of your state regarding taking video, photographs, and voice recordings at polling places. Bring your camera or phone. If you’re hassled, capture it. If someone else is hassled, offer to capture it for them. The best way to deal with these voter suppression efforts is LIGHT. If you get evidence of GOP foul play, share with EVERYONE.
Hopefully some media-savvy citizens in some of these voter suppression states (photo ID will be on the ballot as a constitutional amendment in my state of MN) can document examples of people having trouble obtaining photo ID, having trouble registering, etc until the mainstream media can’t ignore this issue any longer.
Mike Lamb
@Kay: Of course. And I’m sure the list is just chock full of Smiths, Andersons and Clarks….
Or not.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Kay:
__
I get the feeling that this is one area where the Republicans really are playing a long game with the tactic of using small incremental changes to make things much, much worse, but doing so in smaller steps that they hope people won’t notice until one day we wake up to discover that obtaining a non-provisional ballot is as difficult for the average person as Obama proving that his birth certificate is genuine, and say “what the hell happened?”.
Hopefully this year they got so greedy and overreached with too much change all in one cycle that people will start to notice.
cosima
This effort on the part of Gessler is a little tiny offshoot of the shit sandwich he handed Colorado voters this year by enacting a rule that inactivates any voter who did not vote in 2010.
I’ve talked about it here on BJ several times. The number of inactive voters in Denver County alone is now over 200,000. Here’s a link: http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VoterRegNumbers/2012/July/VoterCountsByStatus.pdf
The numbers of voters per party in Denver County:
http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VoterRegNumbers/2012/July/VotersByPartyStatus.pdf
And the number of permanent mail-in ballot voters — those that are directly affected by this rule, and who will not receive their general election ballot via mail, even though the bastards mailed out primary ballots to psych them out:
http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VoterRegNumbers/2012/July/TotalPMIVRequests.pdf
A commenter upthread asked how they can help, even though they don’t live in Colorado — here’s my suggestion: if you have a dashboard account through the Obama campaign you can check to see if you can make calls to inactive voters in CO from your location. We desperately need phonebank help with the inactive voters here. The numbers are so huge that we just cannot reach them all, or even any significant number of them. If that doesn’t work for you, respond to this and I’ll try to find a way to connect with you directly, and find a way for you to help.
Our support team here is completely ineffectual and drives me nuts. We have a volunteer who has moved here from Kansas, just for the summer, to volunteer (felt his efforts in this swing state would be more effective than his home state), and he & I have had brainstorming sessions about how to get this info out to the public (op-eds by state reps, etc, in the Denver Post or the small circulars that abound), compiled lists, passed them on to the leadership, and nothing, not a g-d thing followed up on. Last night I did a voter reg table at a back-to-school night, not the school my daughter attends, and it was me sending out emails and posting on forums that got that effort going. State voter laws or not, there are things that have to be done to combat this, and the staff that has been sent to my corner of Denver is rubbish to the tenth power. I don’t know which states the Obama campaign is sending the good staff to, but it’s not this swing state, not this corner of it anyway. And frankly, if they can’t get it right here in my corner then that is an indication that further up the CO chain there are issues, issues that we cannot be having in this state in this election.
Chris
@General Stuck:
I feel you on the hate front, I really do. A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible to loathe so many of my own countrymen as I do now, but I do. There’s an entire political movement out there trying to deny me my most basic right as a citizen simply because I have the audacity not to vote for them, and fully half the public has nothing to say about it but wild clapping and cheering. How exactly AM I supposed to feel?
Wag
@Kay:
Here are links to recent Denver Post articles about the purge.
editorial 8/29
Court rules againt Gessler 8/30
88%
Wag
@Kay:
Kay-
i think i had too many links in my reply, can you release me from moderation?
Kay
@Wag:
I just did. It should appear shortly.
low-tech cyclist
For this cycle, go local. I’m good with that.
But after that, we’ve got to talk about going Constitutional.
The franchise should be a clear and unambiguous right for all U.S. citizens of 18+ years of age, with burdens on voting (a) kept to the absolute minimum needed to ensure the integrity of elections, and (b) to not be disproportionate to any threats to the integrity of elections.
The Constitution should be amended to say this.
Come January, we should push for Congress to vote on such an amendment. And keep on pushing until we get it.
WaterGirl
Kay, I got to think about the “going local” thing.
I wonder if you would consider writing a sample letter to the editor that many of us could edit a bit and then submit to our local newspapers as a letter to the editor?
You are a bright light of inspiration. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your threads.
Kay
@low-tech cyclist:
I agree. And I want a federal system. I think they could run a lot of it out of post offices. The jobs are alike in many ways (I’ve done both things) and they have this in-place nationwide system that involves names and addresses and a brick and mortar location in every tiny burg. They have a decline in first class mail. Give them elections. They have selective service and (some) passport services, so we’ve been handing them additional federal record-collecting. They have records galore, and they (actually) have a very good record for getting mail where it’s supposed to go. They even have their own federal police force. The Postal Inspection Service has huge police power, so they can police elections, too.
It’s a natural fit. We can all vote at the post office. So easy!
Mnemosyne
@cosima:
It might be worth poking around on the OFA site to see if you can figure out who the regional coordinator is for the West (ie the person above your state coordinator). A complaint to that person from someone who’s actually on the ground in Colorado will probably have a fair amount of weight and may light a fire under your state folks. Just an idea.
Catsy
@General Stuck:
This. Any time I get tempted to give the GOP any assumption of good faith, any belief that at its core it’s just a political party that has a different vision for this country, any benefit of the doubt about being legitimate… I stop and think about their blatantly partisan voter suppression efforts.
This goes way beyond cronyism, dishonesty, or even criminal mischief like Watergate. It’s no-shit, no-hyperbole fascism masquerading as a legitimate political party.
IMO the VRA should apply to every state, and national elections should be governed by Federal law.
Omnes Omnibus
Kay, have you written anything about SEIU v. Husted? Provisional ballot case in S.D Ohio. It is worth a look. I can’t link from here, sorry.
jayjaybear
@Bulworth: On the other hand, here in PA the amount of money available to most state agencies has been cut so drastically that there just aren’t enough people to run things smoothly. I work for the PA Dept of Public Welfare, and I can tell you that phones go unanswered A LOT. Not because caseworkers don’t care, but because caseworkers DON’T HAVE THE TIME to answer the phone every time it rings. Each caseworker in our county office has hundreds of cases active at any given time, and that number only goes up as caseworkers retire or transfer or leave for private industry, because the state is not hiring new caseworkers.
The Dept. of Labor and Industry just completely shut down the Philadelphia Unemployment office. Completely. Everyone laid off. That’s in addition to other, less complete layoffs in other state UC offices.
The governor and Assembly are quietly stealing gears off the machine, until finally, at some point not too far in the future, the whole thing is going to grind to a halt. And it’s NOT the state employees’ faults! Look to the Capitol for blame on that one.
And ultimately, unfortunately, look to the easily-deceived people of PA.
Bokonon
I live in Colorado, and I suspect that what Gessler is doing is distracting from his long-term plan – which is focused on the November elections.
And I suspect that all of this BS we are getting about “investigations” from our crusading, bold Secretary of State … plus his efforts to force local election boards to purge “inactive” voters off the rolls … is simply groundwork for disqualifying lots of ballots come November, and being able to cry “voter fraud”, while trying to tilt the election towards the GOP.
Nothing – absolutely NOTHING – that Gessler has done to date should give us any other feeling. The guy has run his office as a GOP partisan and political operative – pure and simple. And Gessler is too clever to be committing these boners accidentally. Gessler is banking on the fact that the GOP party faithful and the talk radio listeners are hearing the word “voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud” over and over again – forget the substance, forget the shoddy methodology, forget the fact that nobody is actually caught up in Gessler’s sweeps. It is all about imprinting the messaging, and dumping partisan poison in the electoral waters.
Also, Gessler probably believes that he will be given a certain amount of deference by the courts (and the public) if he contests ballot results come November. After all, Gessler insists that he is deeply, seriously concerned about voter fraud … and he wants everyone to think that is a little bit incompetent about rooting it out, he is still just a well-meaning, ardent public servant, trying to do his best.
Just remember Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000.
giltay
@Xenos: Our constitution allows the matter to be decided by act of Parliament. Looking at a brief history, it appears that the franchise wavered back and forth until 1920, with the Conservative Party advocating federal control, and the Liberal Party provincial. It surprises me that it was so recent.
Tokyokie
The spousal unit (who’s a naturalized citizen) and I both make a point to carry our voter registration cards, driver’s licenses and passports to vote. Just in case there’s a question. And it shouldn’t be that way.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Bokonon:
__
The objective here is to discredit and delegitimize the small-d democratic process itself. By their definition any election the Republicans don’t win was a fraudulent election.
__
If you had asked me 10 years ago if I thought we would ever have another civil war in this country I would have laughed at you, long and hard. Now I rate it as a 10% probability to happen during my lifetime, because the very legitimacy of the state is being actively and gleefully destroyed by the Republicans, and that street runs both ways. If this trend continues it won’t take much longer before neither side will be willing to accept an electoral defeat as legitimate, and then the guns will start coming out.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, but I heard about it yesterday, so thanks for the reminder.
Chris
@Catsy:
Honestly, I don’t even associate it with fascism so much as the way America used to be (especially in the Gilded Age). When between poll taxes, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and the patronage/spoils carrot-and-stick approach, votes meant nothing and in effect, the local political boss was the only one whose vote mattered.
That’s what they’re trying to bring us back to. But whatever name it goes by, it’s antidemocratic, unconstitutional and just plain wrong.
Bobby Thomson
Kay, I assume you are familiar with GetID. They checked with PennDOT this morning and were told that only about 5000 people so far have gotten the free ID. I didn’t realize the free ID would not be available up until election day.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I waffle on whether it’s possible or not. Still leaning towards “no,” because even in it’s current weakened state, the middle class society created by the New Deal has made life much too comfortable for Americans to risk in war. (Just ad Bismarck had hoped when he developed the welfare state).
But should they succeed in privatizing the welfare state and thus breaking the middle class society we grew up in, then IMO all bets are off. At that point, I think civil war, revolution or brutal Central America style repression becomes a question of when, not if.
schrodinger's cat
India has an election commissioner, a career bureaucrat, in charge of the elections, it has many more citizens and more parties and the election process is remarkably well run for a country with endemic levels of corruption otherwise. If India can do it why can’t we.
Wag
@schrodinger’s cat:
If India can do it
why can’t wewe should be able to outsource to them, and save precious Koch Brothers money!FTFY
pseudonymous in nc
@giltay:
And Elections Canada manages the registration database and shares it with the provinces. But the power to conduct elections in the US is explicitly reserved to the several states, which means that it’s set by the nation’s worst tier of government and administered by partisan muppets on a county level. The holy sainted constitution is, in this respect, fucked up.
It is, as I’ve said many times here, the kind of thing that election monitors consider a warning sign when encountered in other countries.
Elizabelle
@low-tech cyclist:
I think voting for national office needs to be Federalized.
Nobody wants to live through another Katherine Harris Florida outcome.
And Citizens United needs to die a quick death. Scandalous. Too awful that the media outlets that would report on it are benefitting from its cash infusions.
Ohio Mom
One upside to living in a solidly red suburb is that when I go to vote, all is as it should. Since it’s assumed that almost everyone is voting Republican — and they are — every voter and vote is treated like the precious thing it is.
There are no lines, all the equipment works, and I usually see the mother of one of my son’s classmates sitting behind the table (it’s one of her many part-time jobs) and we get to exchange pleasantries.
The downside to living in a solidly red suburb is that it can be very, very, very lonely. And discouraging. Thanks to everyone here for being my antidote.
gluon1
Don’t forget that you’re not stuck with the so-called “hotline” of the same state government that tried to disfranchise you in the first place. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has voting hotlines (in English and en Espanol) staffed by people who actually want you to vote, regardless of for whom you want to vote.
http://www.866ourvote.org/about & http://veyvota.yaeshora.info/