Bike For Democracy

WireTap. Posted August 4, 2004.

Last year, Mike Sowiski and Brianna Cayo Cotter were sitting around with a group of friends talking about the upcoming election. Brianna had been out of school for two years and had just returned from Europe, where she’d been working as an organizer. Mike had been coordinating a literacy program in Loraine Ohio, near Oberlin College where the two had attended college. It was a crucial year to get involved in politics, the two, along with a group of their fellow students and friends decided, so why not do something to get more of their peers voting? As we know now, this group was not alone. All around the country young Americans from all walks of life were cooking up ideas about ways to get involved. The key difference: Most of these groups weren’t plotting to forge a path across the entire nation, nor were they planning to do it all on bicycles.

Recently, WireTap spoke with Mike and Brianna about Bike for Democracy, the cross-country, non-partisan bike tour to register young voters that the two will embark on next week, along with a crew of their peers. The group plans to leave from Portland, OR on August 12 and will stop in upward of 100 small towns and cities between then and Election Day. Along the way, they’ll help with registration efforts and promote voting rights and protection and they're planning to document the process using on video and audio, as well.

WT: Why a bike ride?

Mike: There’s something about physically using one’s body to move across distance that’s very meaningful and I think also empowering. Nobody who’s doing the trip has actually done anything like this.

One of the things that’s going to be really good about our trip is that just by necessity, we have to stop in many places where a lot of campaigns and mobilizations won’t stop.

Brianna: When we looked around at a lot of other voting initiatives we noticed that they were centered in urban areas…and that’s great but you also lose a lot when you only go to big cities where there’s already a lot of support. We wanted to try to do something which would overlap with those urban centers, but which also was hitting really small towns and cities of smaller sizes that don’t get enough attention.

We’re also in this situation where everyone is telling us what America is and what it stands for, today, and we wanted to find these things out for ourselves, rather than letting other people dictate that. And one of the reasons that war is being fought today is oil. So it also seemed like a good thing to promote biking as a sustainable form of transportation. We’re all in our early 20’s and it’s good timing. When else can you take off and ride across the country?

WT: So, you’re also planning to document your journey. Can you say more about that?

M: What we want to do it get a real dose of what real people have to say across the trip – particularly youth – about government and politics. And you know, while I have a sense of what that is… I think it’s going to be a reality check to talk to young people across the way. Because the stereotype is that the young are disaffected, they don’t vote, they don’t care, or they’re misinformed. Unfortunately, we also carry those stereotypes, as young people. So I think it’s going to be really powerful to try and break through some of those, and to put people in front of a camera or a microphone and ask them, “What do you think?”

I’ve met young people who are Republicans, I’ve met young Democrats, I’ve met Anarchists who don’t want to be part of the electoral process because they think it’s so dirty to begin with. But I want to hear more about what people have to say. I don’t think we want to posit ourselves as the knowing what youth in America think, but I think once we’ve made this journey we’ll know a whole lot more.

WT: What do you think your biggest challenges will be?

B: When you look at the statistics, and see that only a third of young people voted in the last election, that’s a pretty huge challenge, to make those numbers go up…so we’re using the physical challenge as a symbol of that.

For every state we have a coordinator and I’m the Montana State coordinator. I’ve never been to Montana, so it’s a huge challenge just trying to figure out what’s going on there, who to talk to, and how to build trust with people when you’re calling people who may have no reason to trust you.

M: That nature of the project is we’re coming into a community…and spending a few days at most. I know what its like to have people come into your town and it’s like “Who are you? What’s your agenda”…So we have to check ourselves to be receptive to what people in different communities have to say and figure how we can assist in voter mobilization efforts to actually be effective.

I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge and I think we want to incorporate critical thought and reflection into it as well as an openness. I think that we’ll do well, but that’s something we have to be constantly asking ourselves about…and in the future work we do as organizer, documentary-makers, women’s health advocates, or whatever, I think we’ll carry with us afterwards.

B: What I’ve found through doing this is, there are tons of resources in bigger cities like Chicago and Columbus, but in these smaller towns there may be no identifiable groups doing this work, so in some places it’s going through the Kiwanis club, which does community service stuff, or through the Mayor’s office. For most of us who have grown up being urban organizers, it’s a challenge to figure out the different ways that things are done in different places.

WT: There isn’t always a community of youth activists that you can tap into.

B: Exactly. That’s what I’m excited about, too. It’s pretty exciting to me to be talking to these random high school students who live in towns with like five other people who are still doing voter registration drives at their school that’s 20 miles away. That’s more exciting to me than hooking up with a established groups, like a Food Not Bombs chapter in a bigger city.

WT: What groups are you partnering with?

B: One of the most exciting coalitions, that I’m personally really happy about, is with People For The American Way. They’re waging an election protection campaign. When we first started we were thinking we’d mainly just register people to vote, but the more we’ve been talking to people and becoming more informed about what’s going on, it’s clear that election protection and making sure that people know their rights when they go to the polls is really important. We want to ensure that what happened in Florida (and in other lesser known incidents in other parts of the country) does not happen again. So we’re going to be working really closely with People For The American Way to expand their voter protection program – which means helping develop Voter Bills of Rights in places that don’t have them and distributing them. Every time we do a registration, we want that person to leave with their (state-specific) voting bill of rights. We’ll also be recruiting young people to be poll monitors.

We’re also hooked up w/the League of Young Voters and Common Cause for Vote America, Feminist Majority’s “Get Out Her Vote” project, and National Voice, etc. We’re mostly working w/501c3s with the same demographic, doing non-partisan work.

WT: In your materials you mention that crucial time between when somebody registers and when they actually make the decision to vote. What will your message be, in terms of getting people to go beyond registering?

B: Most of the work that we’ll be doing with be with already established groups in the communities [we’re traveling through]. So we’ll be registering with them and giving them the information and letting them do their get out the vote (GOTV) activities with the names we’ve helped them gather. Because, as we know, the best way to get anyone to do anything is when it’s coming from their community and better yet, when it’s coming from their peers. The people that we’ll register, we’re going to keep in our own database and we’ll be sending them post cards from the road.

M: There’s a project called “Stand and Be Counted” and they have a model that’s a “pledge model” – so you get out to the polls and pledge to bring 2 of your friends…it’s a low digit number but it can mean a lot at the polls.

We’re learning that follow up is very important and that makes the whole thing much less romantic. It’s like, can you stay on the corner for 3 hours and get people to vote? No, that’s not it. You need to contact them, I think experienced organizers say between 5-7 times. And that doesn’t mean knocking on someone’s door five times, but you have to work that philosophy into your daily operations as a GOTV operation.

WT: What are your plans for after the election?

M: One of the problems about community work that’s electoral-politics-based…it’s geared up and there are these ninety-day things, and it’s like, “let’s go out and knock on these doors and get them to vote!”…and then they sort of drop it. And that’s definitely not the kind of project we want to do. Most of us are coming to this from other kinds of organizing and activism built on a more sustained perspective.

Some people see this election as the end of things or the beginning of things. And that’s cool if it’s going to get you out and involved now, but stay involved after that. And talk to the politicians that do get into office and think about the future. And other ways to effect change.
B: By October we’ll have 15 people riding with us. Every day, it seems like there’s another person who wants to join us in Ohio. This election is really important to people and they’re trying to figure out what will be the best way to get involved in that month before the election. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we have 25 people, leaving Ohio.

M: After election day we’re going to bike down to DC from Philadelphia and were going to invite as many people as want to come for the ride. And afterwards I’m sure we’re going to eat and sleep a lot but we’re also going to really think hard about what we’ve done so far and what our next steps are. And perhaps in the future we could do larger rides, or maybe smaller, specific to certain communities for the project.

If you’d like to join Bike for Democracy on their post-election ride from Philadelphia to D.C., contact them through their website, www.bikefordemocracy.org

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