May proved to be a busy month, in spite of, for the most part, still being home-bound . After April's launch of our ScrevenForward.org webpage, in May we set up a Screven Forward closed group page on Facebook! We were pleasantly surprised by the response and had over 130 members by the end of the month. In a meaningful leap forward one of our members purchased the list of Georgia voters from the Secretary of State's office. 

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Another member purchased yard signs to remind people to VOTE. The signs were distributed and placed in trafficked areas where they are highly visible. We hope they will be highly effective as well! Our members have written postcards to individuals on the purged voter list for Screven County. These cards alert the purged voter that they may no longer be registered to vote and that they can check their registration status at voterparticipation.org/ or by calling the Screven Co. Registrar at 564-2153.

 

These cards will be mailed in July. We notified our Registrar that the cards would be going out and that she might see some increased activity as a result. She was appreciative for the heads up and for our efforts to get more Screven County residents registered.

 

We have a number of voter registration forms obtained from Francys Johnson's office. We can get more, if needed, from the Screven Co. Democratic Committee chair, Cedric Rhodes. Two of our members have participated in training to be poll workers.

 

Each of our members looked at several online organizations each to see which ones we felt would be helpful and might be included on our webpage. Some of the favorites were: NGP (New Georgia Project), GAvoting, PROGA, When We All Vote, Vote Forward, Ballotpedia, Common Cause and Our Vote.

 

We continued to look at various voter lists of active, inactive and purged voters. We also studied lists by numbers and demographics. We hope to target younger voters and people who are registered but did not vote in 2016 and 2018. One statistic that stood out was that there are 381,000 unregistered African American voters in Georgia.

 

At our May 28th Zoom meeting we were joined by our former congressman John Barrow. He spoke on various subjects and encouraged us in our efforts. He said with so many people moving into the Atlanta area, the fastest growing area in the US, and because so many of those people are progressive in their views, it is moving our state (albeit EVER so slowly) to a more progressive place. That is encouraging news indeed!

 

At one of our meetings we watched a very inspiring video about an older Lowndes County resident who was dedicated to registering voters. It clearly demonstrated how one person can make a difference and bring about positive change. She said, "I do this to make things a little bit better." That is our aim and our desire as well!

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Thanks everyone for your part in moving Screven Forward!!