Hi Friend —
I am writing this with dirt still under my fingernails.
August on the farm is not the pretty season. It is the season of pulling out what is spent. The tomato vines have gone leggy and bitter, the squash gave what it was going to give, and the whole garden has that tired look things get when they have done their work. So this week I have been out in the heat tearing it out by the roots — hauling it off, turning the beds, mending fence, and taking inventory.
Not glamorous, but it has to be done now, because it cannot be done later. Winter is coming, and every sign says this one will be hard. The forecasters have their name for it — a Super El Niño, the strongest pattern in decades. It will be rough. So, we’re getting ready.
We see a winter coming at True the Vote, too.
And I do not mean the midterms. I mean something more than that.
There are hard months ahead — for our country and, I believe, for the world — as we grapple with how to go on standing together. How to keep living out that love of liberty God once pressed into Abraham's heart, and then sent him walking toward a country he had never laid eyes on.
We are being asked to do the same — into an uncertain peace, across cultural divides that keep on widening, and now into the arrival of artificial intelligence, which is going to reshape work and truth and trust and elections faster than any of us are ready for.
And I suspect you see all of it the way I see it. It is good and evil. It has always been good and evil, just seems clearer now. You cannot always tell who is who or what is really what, and yet somewhere underneath it all, you know exactly what you are looking at.
What I feel most is time moving. Moving toward something very different. I don’t think any of us can stop it, and I am not certain we are meant to. But which way “different” goes — whether it turns out good — that part is ours. That is the part we will answer for.
It’s a high call — to preserve what is good, to stay strong, and to put things in the ground now for a spring we may not see for a while.
Which is the other half of what I am doing out in the garden … clearing out is only the first job. The second is planting. Garlic (if I can find sets, everything is sold out. Ugh!) goes into the cold ground in the fall, and you cover it over, and all winter long nothing happens that anybody can see. Then one morning in spring, there it is. It was working the entire time, down in the dark, where you could not watch it.
That is what we are doing at True the Vote right now. Preparing for what is ahead by putting things in the ground now.
Preparing for growth. More Americans are awake than ever. 83% of all of America is now saying aloud that our elections need an overhaul.
This is the part that encourages me more than anything has in fifteen years.
People who rolled their eyes at us in 2010 are calling us now, asking what they can do. Doors that stayed shut for years are swinging open.
But being awake is not the same as being connected — and connection is the whole ballgame. A million people who each feel alone are not a movement. They are a million people who eventually give up.
So now we have to find one another, and we have to do it fast. That is what all of this is for:
LegiTrack — tracking election legislation across all fifty statehouses, so nothing moves in the dark.
Scan. Check. Protect. — putting the power to verify a voter record into an ordinary citizen's hand.
VoteAlert — so what a citizen sees on Election Day does not die in a parking lot. Photo, video, location, filed from a phone in the moment, reviewed by our team, and posted where the rest of the country can see it.
IV3 — where all of this started. Any registered voter can work their own county's rolls, find the records that no longer belong there, and file them through their state's own process. (currently on pause, but soon to be back with new capabilities)
True the Vote Now — our sister organization and the Community Platform it provides.
And the True the Vote website itself, with all the trainings, the reference guides, the research, the records requests, the state-by-state playbooks, the films, like the upcoming documentary series TRAPPED — all of it free to use, all of it built by us, all of it kept running by people like you.
None of that is free to operate.
We are also still in court, still paying down legal fees from fights we did not start, and weeks out from launching the documentary series TRAPPED — which includes years of work, thousands of hours, and shows the human cost of vote fraud told by the people who lived it.
We need your help to keep going.
I really do not like asking. I know times are tight. I know it. I am not writing to you from some office where the lights are always on and somebody else pays the bill.
But if everyone reading this could give even five dollars a month — or heck, even just once — True the Vote would have the budget to scale our initiatives and our team and meet the future head on.
Five dollars a month.
Or once, if that is what you have. Either one, from everyone reading this letter, and we go into the future able to do the work instead of triaging it.
I know how small it sounds. Five dollars is a cup of coffee you would have forgotten by lunch. But True the Vote was never built by a handful of people writing big checks. It was built by a great many ordinary Americans each doing one small thing at the same time — which happens to be the way a country gets mended, and the way a garden gets put up before the frost.
Please help us if you can.
Change is coming. I think most of us can feel it and are bracing for it.
It’s ok. Do not fear it. And please — please do not tap out because of it.
It is going to be different. I will not pretend otherwise. Whether it turns out good is the part we still have a say in. And standing together now, actually together, in one another's lives and not merely in one another's feeds, will without question change the course of history.
Maybe we really are the change we have been waiting for somebody else to bring. Maybe this is the time. We think it is.
So let us start rising together — and not only by voting. Voting is the floor, not the ceiling. Rise by engaging. And there is plenty to engage in that come along with cleaning up our elections: helping our neighbors find their voice, and making sure that when they use it, somebody actually hears it.
That is the work. It is not glamorous. And it has to be done now, because it cannot be done later.
Winter is coming. So is Spring. Let us be ready.
Keep fighting the good fight. Keep the faith. Never quit. Ephesians 6 FTW!
Ever onward —
P.S. — Five dollars a month. That is the whole ask. If every person who opens this letter gives five dollars a month — or even once — we can stop triaging and start scaling, going into the future firing on all cylinders. Please do not assume somebody else will cover your share. The whole idea only works if it is all of us. Thank you for your consideration.