A Philadelphia suburb’s novel solution for getting the vote out – a voting van

Maxine Endy had been on the phone with her neighbors in her towering apartment complex in King of Prussia, a Philadelphia suburb, trying to get them to vote. Several people told Endy, an octogenarian (“don’t put my age in the newspaper”) they weren’t sure how to get a ballot. Many of them weren’t sure where to go to the polls.

Another woman in the complex had even seen a confused neighbor go to the lobby of her building and ask a receptionist for a mail-in ballot.

Neil Makhija, one of three Montgomery county commissioners in suburban Philadelphia, who had stopped by that afternoon smiled and pointed outside. There was a van in the parking lot where voters could cast their ballot, register to vote, ask and return a mail-in ballot or fix any issues with their ballots. A murmur went through the room. “We didn’t know that,” someone said. “Can we send out an email?”

“We need to get that message out just as fast as we can,” Endy said. “People are a little reluctant to go to the polls, it’s hard for them to walk. But if they were parked close to one of the buildings, we could get a lot of people downstairs.”

The van, Makhija’s brainchild, started traveling around the county earlier this month. Over the course of about an hour last week, staffers said they assisted a few dozen people in the parking lot of the Valley Forge towers. The van, the first of its kind in Pennsylvania, will have made around a dozen stops, each lasting a few hours, by the end of October.

Makhija said it’s not uncommon to hear that people are learning about the van for the first time. “This is the first time anything like this has ever existed,” Makhija said. “They’re always like ‘what? I can do that?’”

The van is a novel example of how officials are chasing down votes in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that is a must-win for both presidential campaigns. It’s an approach that seeks to flip the burden of voting on its head – instead of requiring the voter to jump through administrative hoops to cast a ballot, it charges officials with going out to meet voters and make it as easy as possible for them to vote.

Even if it affects a small number of votes, it could make a big difference in Pennsylvania. Polls show a deadlocked race, and Republicans have supported getting mail-in votes thrown out over small deficiencies. In Montgomery county, officials usually reject at least 1,000 mail-in votes each cycle and only 10% of those with errors get cured, the newsmagazine Bolts reported. The county released a list on Tuesday of 350 people who submitted mail-in ballots with deficiencies that would be rejected unless they were fixed.

But Democrats like Makhija are trying to make sure every vote is counted.

Joe Biden won Montgomery county in 2020 by more than 134,000 votes. It was one of several Democratic-leaning Philadelphia suburbs where he was able to run up the vote to help him win the state – something Harris will have to do this year to win the state.

Makhija, who taught election law at the University of Pennsylvania and was elected to the county commission last year, first started thinking about the van years ago as courts ruled that ballots in Pennsylvania could be rejected for minor deficiencies like forgetting to write the date on the ballot or placing it in a secrecy sleeve.

As he watched third-party groups chase voters to try and track down voters, he wondered why government officials weren’t doing more to help voters fix the mistakes. It took him nearly a year to get the van implemented. In an interview with Bolts earlier this year, he described it as an ice-cream truck for voting.

“Non-profits are out there trying to find people who are not registered. I’m like, ‘Why do they have to do all this work when we in government are supposed to help you vindicate your rights?’”

Two elections employees usually staff the van, which has a ballot printer on board. Residents can also request, fill out, and return a ballot on the spot. If an absentee ballot they’ve requested is at risk of being rejected for technical reasons, they can cancel the ballot and request a new one.

Mike Gressen, 69, a local Democratic committee person who lives in the complex said he thought the van was a “spectacular idea”.

“There’s some people where they have so many things going on in their life, whether it’s through health, illness, friends or just life in general,” he said. “This van really solves many of these problems.”

Not everyone is a fan. When Atlanta tried out a similar bus in 2020, Georgia Republicans responded by passing a law that outlawed them, except in cases of emergency. In Montgomery county, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit last week asking a local judge to block the county from conducting voter registration services from the van until it provides adequate public notice of where the van will be. State law requires officials to post public notice of wherever they conduct voter registration and say the county isn’t giving enough notice.

Makhija noted that the county posts where the van will be on its website. And staffers aren’t technically doing voter registration on the spot, he said. They’re sending voter registration forms back to the main election office to be processed.

“Some people here are Democrats, some are Republicans,” Makhija said. “They’re trying to prevent their parents and grandparents from voting.”