I am pleased to welcome Ciara Torres-Spelliscy to the ELB Book Corner, writing about her new book Corporatocracy. This is the third of four posts:
Because of the “Big Lie,” most Republicans to this day think the 2020 election was stolen. But we should not let this distortion sully what the 2020 election was: a herculean and successful effort to run a national election during a pandemic.
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not stick round long enough to impact the 1920 election. A century later, America was not so lucky. The 2020 presidential election took place smack dab in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, before there was a vaccine.
Voters clamored for safe ways to vote in 2020, and many states responded by expanding ways to vote. With millions of American voters voting by mail for the first time, voter confusion surfaced.
One 2020 PSA featured topless female Pennsylvania legislators reminding Pennsylvanians who were voting by mail to avoid the “naked ballot” problem. (Viewers could not see their breasts, but they could see that the women were indeed topless. Sample ballots covered the upper half of their torsos.) Inspired by these lawmakers, celebrities copying the trope also got naked for democracy. In a celebrity PSA, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Mark Ruffalo, and Amy Schumer, showed up in their birthday suits to remind Pennsylvania voters that they had to use a secrecy envelope when they returned their mail-in ballots— otherwise those ballots could be deemed “naked” and rejected by officials. The celebrity ad was launched by the pro-democracy nonprofit RepresentUS.
Pennsylvania expanded the availability of mail-in ballots to all registered voters under Act 77 in 2019. Partially because of this new law and partially because of the pandemic, the use of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania jumped over tenfold from 2016 to 2020: from 266,208 to 2,704,147.
The naked-ballot problem was the result of a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that naked ballots could be rejected. This was a reversal, as naked ballots counted during the 2020 primary. Lisa Deeley, the top election official in Philadelphia, told Politico, “This [naked ballot problem] has the potential of disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters…[and] one voter who is disenfranchised is one too many.”
In the end, far fewer naked ballots were reported in the general election than experts predicted, so perhaps all of the PSAs (clothed and naked) informed Pennsylvanians how to comply with the law.
Get out the vote (GOTV) ads were particularly inventive in the swing state of Georgia. Folks who lived in Atlanta may have seen some unique PSAs featuring strippers urging voters to participate in the upcoming election. If amateur strippers showed up in the Pennsylvania ads, professional strippers appeared in the Georgia ads. As described by NPR, “[A] woman in knee high, lace up boots walks away from the camera, toward a stage decorated with patriotic bunting. . . . The beat drops, the woman and other dancers begin to perform, and the repeated message is a simple one: ‘Get Your Booty To The Poll.’ . . .”
As a producer of the ads, Paul Fox explained the genesis of the ad: “This video really started with the death of George Floyd in May [2020] and us feeling like there was a better way to voice a need for change . . . We wanted to . . . get people, especially men, to vote.” Thus, the Get Your Booty to the Poll PSAs mentioned police brutality, cash bail, and public schools.
Georgia in 2020 was a microcosm of a changing American electorate, and whoever cracked the code of GOTV in Georgia would attain enormous political power. If you’d like to learn more, then please read Corporatocracy or listen to my new radio show Democracy & Destiny.