When we launched the podcast miniseries, At the Polls, we asked listeners to send us their questions about voting this year. While over 44 million people have already cast their ballots, some questions remain about our rights and options as voters. Listen to the full podcast for your most frequent voter questions, answered.

At the Polls: You Asked, We Answered

At the Polls: You Asked, We Answered

For the last few months, we've been gathering your voting questions. Hundreds of you have sent in voice messages, videos and emails with your most pressing concerns. These submissions have informed our At the Polls episodes, but we couldn't answer...

For the last few months, we've been gathering your voting questions. Hundreds of you have sent in voice messages, videos and emails with your most pressing concerns. These submissions have informed our At the Polls episodes, but we couldn't answer...

Listen to this episode

Should I deliver my ballot by hand or by mail?

All voters should make a voting plan that works best for them, whether that means mailing their ballot, putting it in a drop box, or delivering it by hand. First, voters should make sure they know the deadlines in their state. Some states require all ballots to be back in the hands of election officials on Election Day. In others, your ballot must be postmarked by a certain date. Rules vary across states, so look up deadlines in your state as you decide how to cast your ballot — and return it early.

How do I make sure my mail-in ballot is counted?

In 45 states, voters can track their ballots online to see if it has been received. In other states — Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Mississippi — some local election officials track ballots. To see if your state offers ballot tracking, check out aclu.org/voter under “voting tips.”

If I use a voting machine, how can I confirm that my vote has not been altered?

There have never been any occurrences of widespread fraud in American elections. Elections are administered at the county and municipal level throughout the country, and polling places are staffed by professional election administrators whose job is to make sure your ballot is counted and your voice is heard. Further, most jurisdictions in the U.S. use paper ballots, ballot marking devices, or machines that provide a voter with a verified paper trail that they can use to make sure their vote was recorded properly.

I’ve requested an absentee ballot. Can I change my mind and vote in person?

The answer depends on where you live. In some states, including California, Michigan, and Florida, you must bring your absentee ballot with you when you vote in person. If you haven’t received your mail-in ballot, you will have to cast a provisional ballot at the polls.

Besides presidential candidates, what else can I expect on my ballot?

There are important and impactful races up and down the ballot this year, from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate and state and local elections. While advocates can’t go around knocking on doors this year due to COVID-19, we can all get involved online. Local ballot measures can impact civil rights and civil liberties nationwide.

Oklahoma’s State Question 805 is an example. Oklahoma one of the biggest incarcerators in the country — and in the world — in part because of unjust policies that can land you in prison for decades or even life for low-level offenses like drug possession and shoplifting. There are similar policies across the country, so what happens in Oklahoma this year could help to start the conversation in other states.

Nebraska’s Initiative 428 is another example of a critical economic justice policy that could have nationwide implications. Measure 428 would put a cap on interest rates from predatory payday lenders at 36 percent. Currently, interest rates can be as high as 400 percent — often trapping individuals into a vicious cycle of debt. Payday lending is a predatory practice that has historically targeted communities of color across the country, so all voters should pay attention to Nebraska’s outcome on Initiative 428.

If members of my family can’t speak English, can they vote?

English is not a requirement to cast your ballot. Many jurisdictions provide resources to accommodate multilingual voting and to ensure that everybody can exercise their right to vote regardless of which language they speak.

If you have run into issues when voting, call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline.

• English: 1-866-OUR-VOTE / 1-866-687-8683
• Spanish: 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA / 1-888-839-8682
• Arabic: 1-844-YALLA-US / 1-844-925-5287
• For Bengali, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, or Vietnamese: 1-888-274-8683

What should I do if I encounter intimidation at the polls?

Voter intimidation can take many forms, but voters should not expect to encounter it when they go to the polls. The ACLU and the broader voting rights community remain vigilant and are working to make sure that no voters face intimidation while exercising their right to vote.
No one has the right to take your vote from you. But if you do experience intimidation, there are ways to get help. Call 1-866-OUR-VOTE to report occurrences of voter intimidation.

At the end of the day, what everybody should know is that they can get help. The ACLU and other voting rights advocates are ready to jump into action should problems arise. Your job is to vote.

For information on voting in your state, see the Let People Vote guide. If you want to volunteer from home, visit peoplepower.org to learn how.

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In early June, as people around the globe joined in massive protests against the police brutality and racism that killed him, George Floyd was laid to rest at the same Pearland, Texas cemetery where his mother is buried. Led by a horse-drawn carriage containing his body, George Floyd’s grieving family and hundreds of supporters walked slowly from the church to the burial ceremony. 
 
What they did not know is that on the rooftops above them, six teams of snipers were positioned to fire on the crowd of mourners. Manned surveillance aircraft and drones circled in the sky above. And hundreds of local and state police, federal agents including Border Patrol, and National Guard personnel were prepared to descend upon the mourners with extreme violence at even the slightest provocation.  
 
All of this was revealed in police records that the ACLU of Texas obtained earlier this month. The records also show the federal tactical teams were authorized to get “geared up” and “ready to deploy” in view of the crowd in response to as little as “verbal aggressive language” against police officers or throwing empty water bottles. And their instructions permitted rapid escalation, including the use of gas munitions and even “use of deadly force anytime under Ch. 9 Texas Penal Code” against the mourners if the federal agents, police officers, or soldiers believed it necessary.  
 
A Powerpoint briefing deck created in preparation for these deployments describes the “mission” of this multi-agency force as “provid[ing] security for Pearland Police Department, Dawson High School, and the surrounding area with officers stationed for a quick response to rioting and looting.” The only apparent factual basis for these fears were social media posts and messages that a handful of Pearland residents shared with the police department, in many cases expressing their fears that the burial would lead to looting and other property damage.  
 
There is a peculiar kind of racist imagination at play in these messages and the broader discourse on “looting”: the notion that rather than paying their respects to the dead and watching in anguish as George Floyd is lowered into the ground, Black mourners will use the funeral and burial as a reason to fan out across a small Texas town and steal goods from its stores. In this warped framework, any gathering of Black people expressing sadness or anger is a threat to be surveilled, and something that must be neutralized if its participants show the smallest sign of organized resistance. This results in heavily armed police and federal agents being given full permission to wield violence, including deadly violence, against Black people even in times of grief. In this framework, no corner of Black life is free from the threat of police violence — including mourning the people whose lives were taken by that same violence.  
 
This same racist, harmful role for policing — planning violence against Black people in order to deter real or imagined threats to white property ownership — dates back to slavery. Such white fears were common during slavery, because systems of white supremacy require force to maintain themselves. Indeed, the first municipally-funded police department in America was the Charleston City Watch and Guard, a specialized form of slave patrol that monitored Black social gatherings, shut down underground meetings, and sought to block enslaved Black people from organizing resistance to or escape from bondage. 
 
After the end of the Civil War, slavery ended but the mission of police departments and local sheriffs did not change much. Across the former Confederacy, these agencies enforced the Black Codes: an arbitrary set of restrictions that made it hard for newly-freed Black people to organize politically or move to new places in search of better opportunities. Texas was no exception; the Texas Rangers in particular were widely known in the nineteenth century for extrajudicial killings of Mexican Americans and bounty hunting of Black people who escaped from slavery. Meanwhile, their investigation of a 1919 race riot focused less on the Ku Klux Klan than on civil rights groups that they blamed for inciting the riot (at the height of this riot, a mob of nearly 1,000 white people burned down multiple Black-owned houses and killed Black people without law enforcement intervening). It was more than a century after the end of the Civil War, in 1988, that a Black person was first appointed to join the Texas Rangers. And this was not confined to the South: Police in northern cities adopted similar racist practices as more Black people arrived as part of the Great Migration. 
 
Targeting George Floyd’s burial march with snipers and aerial surveillance fits all too comfortably into this history. Not only are the white fears the same, but the weapons and agencies being used to placate those fears and maintain white supremacy are the same. Now, they’re just upgraded with 21st century technology and assisted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has grown to become the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency and claimed broad powers in communities across the nation. 
 
As a result, George Floyd’s family and community cannot even mourn his death at the hands of police without being surveilled by aircraft and drones, under the watch of snipers, federal tactical teams, and National Guard members ready to unleash tear gas and bullets on them at a moment’s notice.  
 
It would be both lazy and wrong to blame this on “bad apples.” Multiple officials at the local, state, and federal levels approved this militarized and potentially lethal response to George Floyd’s burial ceremony. This is about the rot at the core of American policing. 
 
It is time for us to fundamentally rethink the role of policing in American society. While crime has been trending downward for decades and violent crime and property crime have fallen significantly since the early 1990s, over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the United States has almost tripled, resulting in further lethal violence and harm against Black communities. Until we address how white supremacy so easily uses policing as a weapon against Black communities, and until we concretely reduce the role, power, and responsibilities of the police in American life, Black mourners of the next victim of police violence will be forced to wonder whether a sniper on a nearby rooftop is awaiting orders to interrupt their mourning with yet more violence.

Carl Takei, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality

The worst night of my life was the night that changed everything.
 
It was hot out. That’s the code word sex workers use to warn each other if police are nearby. I ducked into a card room called Georgianne’s to hide, where I busied myself with an arcade machine, slipping quarter after quarter into the coin slot to make the world go away for a moment — or at least for the length of one Ms. Pac-Man game.
 
That peace came to a halt when a man came up and flashed a wad of bills in my face. He told me to meet him out back so the police wouldn’t see him leave with me. I knew this was never a good idea. As a sex worker, if no one sees who you leave with, you may never come home. But I didn’t care and went with him anyway, thinking he was like any other client on any other night.
 
When we got to his house, he locked the door and blocked it with a fan. He said he was a police officer, but I knew he was lying. A police officer would never take me home. My gut told me not to go through with it, but when I tried to leave, he snatched me by the hair and dragged me back into his house. He raped me several times that night. He even tried to kill me.

In the movies, when someone strangles you, you die. That isn’t always the truth. You come back and you breathe again and you’re in the same hell that you left, surrounded by blood and broken glass. I didn’t know whether the blood was his or mine, but it didn’t matter. That night, I fought for my life like only the dying can.

I tried everything, until finally I played dead and he bought it — but it didn’t stop him. Thinking I was dead, he dragged me out the back door and down the steps to his car, where he raped me one more time before throwing me in the trunk. I watched, still playing dead, as he went back inside the car to clean up the mess. I had a chance to run — and I took it.
 
My legs wouldn’t work. My foot had been badly injured, too. So I crawled and limped away until I made it to the first cross street. A car drove up. Four men were inside. It was only when I saw the looks on their faces — pure terror — that I realized the extent of what that man did to me.
 
“We don’t want anything to do with this,” said the driver. “But we’re gonna take you somewhere safe.”
 
They took me to the UC Davis Medical Center. I ended up in the rape unit, where nurses washed off the blood, stitched up my wounds, and gave me a rape kit before calling the police. Even though I knew I might be arrested for prostitution, I decided to report anyway — that man was too dangerous, and I didn’t want anybody else to go through what I did. I went straight to the district attorney, who looked at the pictures and the rape kit and decided to believe me.
 
But at trial, it became painfully clear that my word as a sex worker was worthless. I’ll never forget the way it felt to take the stand and retell the experience for an entire courtroom, answering questions about why I was in a certain place at a certain hour, as if it was my fault. I knew they judged me for what I did for a living, and the outcome of the case speaks volumes to how society sees sex workers: The man who kidnapped, raped, and tried to kill me was sentenced to 45 days of community service. According to the court, what he did to me that night amounted to petty theft.

Credit: Max Whitaker

My story is as shocking as it is common. Sex workers frequently face violence on the job, but we usually won’t report because we might be arrested in the process. When we do report, we don’t get heard because of the social stigma that being a sex worker carries. My experience that night and the injustice that followed spurred me to fight for the rights society denied me. And the first step in that fight is to decriminalize sex work.
 
Since sex workers do not have access to many of the same protections as other workers, we have to fend for ourselves. It isn’t easy to keep yourself safe if you are constantly afraid of being arrested. Those of us who work on the street will rush through client negotiations to avoid being seen, sometimes jumping into dangerous situations with violent clients because we didn’t have time to screen the client first. People who work online also have limited ability to watch out for their safety. In 2018, the passage of SESTA/FOSTA banned many online sex work and client screening platforms that sex workers use to stay safe. And once you’re caught in a risky situation, there’s nobody to call for help without risking arrest.

Criminalization also puts us at higher risk of police abuse. Throughout my career, I’ve been sexually assaulted and robbed by the police several times, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I have also encountered police officers who helped me — in some instances, possibly saving my life by warning me of areas to avoid if other police were patrolling nearby. But sex workers should not have to rely on chance to stay safe, and those who swore to serve and protect should be helping rather than harming us.
 
I have been to jail several times for prostitution. Other sex workers, such as trans women of color, are even more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and harassed, partly because the police profile and target them. The punishment doesn’t end with a jail sentence — having an arrest for prostitution on your criminal record is a scarlet letter, considered a crime of moral turpitude. It makes it difficult or sometimes even impossible to get a job, sign a lease, or access everyday services — even banking. I was shocked when I got a letter from my bank announcing they were closing my account. Even though I had good credit and had been a customer for decades, they said my job made me a “high risk” customer and violated their code of ethics. If sex work were decriminalized, banks would probably have fairer policies, and it would be easier for us to advocate for our rights.

Opponents of decriminalization are often trying to “save” us from trafficking and exploitation. In my experience, attempts to save sex workers through law enforcement have done the opposite. Raids, arrests, and stop-and-search policies push us further into the margins, where violence goes unchecked. Making an occupation illegal does not stop exploitation and trafficking — exploitation and trafficking proliferate because sex workers can’t report, don’t have resources, and social stigma silences us. Sex workers are not infantile beings who don’t know what’s good for us. We are the last people who want to perpetuate exploitation and harm, because we’re the ones who are affected. We want labor rights, we want justice, and we want to be treated the same as any other worker under the law. First and foremost, we need people to listen to us.
 
I’m proud to be a part of the movement for sex workers’ rights. In my home state of California, we banned the use of condoms as evidence of sex work by police. This will encourage workers to carry and use protection without fear of arrest, protecting both their health and that of their clients.The same law also allows sex workers to report violent offenses such as trafficking, rape, and robbery with complete immunity from arrest — not just for prostitution, but for misdemeanor charges related to sex work or drugs. Every day I see more signs that attitudes are changing, including at the federal level. Last year, Congress introduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, which calls for studying the effects of SESTA/FOSTA on sex workers’ safety and well-being. Decriminalization is by no means a panacea, but it will create positive changes for sex workers.
 
If sex work were decriminalized, sex workers would be able to seek help when we’re in danger. We could go to the hospital in times of emergency without fear of arrest. We would have more autonomy. And we wouldn’t get entangled with the criminal justice system for a misdemeanor that will follow us for life. Decriminalization is the step we need to take to keep us all safe.

Kristen DiAngelo, Executive Director, Sex Workers Outreach Project Sacramento