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In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with organizer Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson about what it means to defend an election under authoritarianism, beyond simply telling people to “vote harder.” They discuss the “win, prove, enforce” framework, the strategic case for early voting, how ordinary people can help protect the voting process, and why relational organizing and staying in right relationship across political differences will matter in the months ahead.Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes.

As we head toward the midterms, the right-wing agenda is clear: undermine and sabotage the voting process by any means possible. From gerrymandering and voter-roll purges, to an expanding citizenship-verification effort — and a scheme to sabotage mail-in voting that has failed in court, for now — it’s clear the GOP doesn’t believe it can win without mucking up the process entirely. And if Republicans endure big losses, there are also very real concerns about whether they will honor the results, or what efforts they may make to obstruct the seating of a new Congress in January.

As we consider these possibilities, and what concerned people can do, we will be hearing from my friend Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson. Ash-Lee and I recently talked about the “win, prove, enforce” framework for electoral defense, the strategic value of early voting, and what people can actually do between now and the point when election results are enforced.

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Kelly Hayes: Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: Hey, Kelly. Thanks for having me.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today, friend?

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: We’re in the home stretch. Some would say maybe the roller coaster downhill spiral into November-3rd land, which you know all too well is the midterm election. It’s a busy time. To pull the quote that all the lefties are talking about right now, “It is a time of monsters.” I’m feeling that. I feel scared. I feel concerned. I feel angry and sad and grieving about the state of this country and its impact on our people. But I’ve also never felt closer to the wins that we’ve always wanted, that could fill the vacuum that this administration and corporate Democrats are creating. In Gemini fashion, I’m feeling all the feels today, Kelly, but feeling really grateful for the ways that people across differences are coming together to try to fight for some semblance of democracy in this place.

Kelly Hayes: That resonates so much. My stress level is sky-high lately, but also feeling really heartened by the ways that I see people moving and taking action, and also encouraged that a lot of people are asking what they can do and how they can help out right now. I’m glad people are asking those questions and looking for ways to be constructive, because I think a lot of things about this moment are confusing by design.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: That’s right.

Kelly Hayes: And I’m really excited to be in conversation with you, as someone I really trust around these issues of electoralism, and how lefties and radicalized folks should think about engaging with these things. I am interested in your guidance, right now, not just for my listeners, but also for myself. But before we dive into that, can you tell the audience just a bit about yourself and your work?

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: Sure. Well, like Kelly said, my name is Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson. My homies call me Ash. I use she/her/her pronouns. I’m a Black woman who’s about caramel-skinned with skin grafts and a big salt and pepper afro. And I come from Southern Appalachian, Black South folks, who came together also across difference to learn from each other and build community and family together. I’m an organizer, I’m an activist, I am a Southern supremacist who is particularly biased towards the great state of Tennessee. I’m from Southeast Tennessee.

Some folks know me because I’m a former co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center or the Highlander Folk School that is based in East Tennessee. I’m a founder of Utopian Visions and Experiments4Good. I have served in leadership capacities of a lot of different frontline movements, including the Movement for Black Lives. Long story short, I’m a missionary Baptist preacher’s daughter and a Black Panther party member’s daughter. I’m just trying to win and live in a world where we have healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities and don’t have to fight this damn hard. I’d rather have different problems after this particular era of fightback and building. That’s the quick and dirty. I’m just trying to do good in the world.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I appreciate the good you do. And I really appreciated an article you wrote recently called, “What To Do During A Coup” that aims to help people through the nitty gritty practicalities of how to organize and move through this moment, with regards to the midterms. I think a lot of people are feeling exasperated and overwhelmed by all of the ongoing assaults on the voting process. You’ve argued for an organizing approach that goes beyond working turnout. Can you tell us what the “win, prove, enforce” framework consists of, and what it asks of people who want to see the freest, fairest elections possible?

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: Yeah. I wish I was smart enough to be able to take credit for that framework, but actually it comes from a dear friend, and someone who I think will go on to be a superhero in the fight against authoritarianism, Hardy Merriman. He and the folks that have contributed to the Hold the Line framework, I think really did a lot of thinking about, what are the lessons globally from folks who have fought back and beaten back authoritarian attacks? And one of the things that came out of the synthesis of the learnings was this concept of “fight, win, prove and enforce.” Some people know it as “ensure, win, prove and enforce.”

To keep it super simple and move it out of this sort of jargon that it can sometimes become in movement spaces, it’s really quite simple and could be applied to probably any kind of campaign, but the framework is really specifically about elections and its creation. So step one is ensure that there are elections in the first place. You cannot have a healthy democracy if folks aren’t actually getting to participate in the process to choose who governs them. Ensuring fighting to make sure that there are elections in the first place is the first part of the framework.

Winning, in the context of the elections, is win the elections and even more importantly, win them beyond a reasonable doubt. Win them in such large margins that it becomes much harder for the authoritarian regime to steal it. It’s not my estimation or assertion that they actually care about the law, that they actually care about elections at all. In fact, I don’t think the right wing gives two shits about elections. I think they are intentionally trying to make as much chaos and confusion as possible to consolidate as much power and wealth as possible. The elections are just a means to an end at this point.

Think about it from our perspective, the perspective of people of goodwill, regardless of your ideology. If we win it outright by huge margins, whatever the Senate or the House seat – if it’s a governor’s race, if it’s your dogcatcher, whatever the race is, if you win it beyond the margin of error, and it becomes really, really clear that the people have said what they want, lots of things then become more possible.

If the right wing still … If the authoritarian regime still steals it, cheats, doesn’t seat duly elected people, then obviously you have a base, a community of people, folks who voted en masse, who can be politicized in that moment and encouraged to be more non-cooperative. You did the thing that was the least risky in some ways. You did the thing that was exhausting administrative remedies and they are still doing this evil thing, you should now be even more non-cooperative. So it’s an opportunity if you’re thinking like a strategist and like an organizer to move to the next tier of the escalation plan and fighting back against an authoritarian attack.

And on the flip side is if you win it outright and they don’t steal it, then you won and you use that as an opportunity to show people that when they use their rights, organizing gets the goods. So mobilizing and organizing that intersection gets the goods. So either way, winning beyond a shadow of a doubt and beyond the slim margins, winning so big that they can’t even argue with you is proof that they can’t fight against in court. And if they still steal it, if they still put an energy to fight back against it, it gives your people an opportunity to mobilize. So that’s “fight,” that’s “win.”

“Prove” is prove that you won. Some people say that this is where election defense and protection work starts. I disagree with that assessment, but it is true that it is connected to that sacred work. This is where we make sure that every single vote gets counted. We make sure that the chain of custody with the ballots does not get broken and therefore makes it impossible for us to prove that our people came out and voted and it was legit and these folks deserve to be seated because our people voted, used their voices and voted, voted for these folks.

And then last but certainly not least is “enforce.” It’s to enforce the results that we have proven. It’s basically just like the life cycle of a vote. You want to make sure that you get to cast a ballot, you want to get everybody you know to also join you in doing that and win outright. You want to be able to prove that those votes existed and were properly administered, and then you want to enforce the results of that decision. That’s the real basics.

And to me, all four of those stages are critically important. All four of those stages, in my estimation, are election protection and defense work. Some people will say that the sexy work … Certainly folks that have critiques of electoralism, which includes myself, sometimes we’re like, “Yeah, that GOTV work is a distraction from some of the other real issue area and identity politic work that we do.” And what’s real is if that stage doesn’t happen, there’s no election to prove and enforce.

And then once we do get those folks out, that “prove and enforce” work becomes really critical and sometimes we don’t take it as seriously because we’re just so focused on getting a vote out. So all four of those stages are really important. We need all of them.

Kelly Hayes: I appreciate your point about how the right doesn’t really care about elections. I think the fact that the right is so determined to kill any semblance of a democratic process has led to some liberals and leftists feeling ambivalence around the election — like, well, why pour so much energy into winning an election if they’re just going to sabotage it or refuse to honor it? The prospect of that happening can make people feel like the election itself isn’t really where the fight is.

But the fact that the right wants to hopscotch right over the election doesn’t mean that we can afford to leap past it. Because, the truth is, we need electoral outcomes to point to, both legally and narratively, in order to wage the fights that might come next. Those struggles may happen within the legal system, and they may happen in the streets, or both, if it comes to that, but we need to establish the will of the people. We need that legal and narrative stake in the ground.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: That’s right. It’s also to me, as a Black Southerner, just quite simple. There’s a difference between non-cooperation and non-compliance and just non-participation. And I feel like all too often, some of us on the left conflate them as all the same thing and they’re not. If you are refusing to participate in the midterms because of your ideological stance. Like, “Okay. I’d love to hear grounds around how that’s strategic and willing to be in principled struggle around it.” But let’s be so for real, if there’s not a strategic plan that tells me and my neighbors that I am accountable to and from how we’re going to keep them safe and get them more power, then the absence of that strategy makes it absolutely implicitly not non-cooperation and not non-compliance. It just makes it non-participation with the expectation that sometime in the great by and by we’ll have enough randomly consolidated power to be able to do something. That’s just not convincing in a time of authoritarianism.

I just think we have to be sharper about what we can do, what we do have the power to do, and not in the magical thinking of moving strategies with the movement we wish we had or the movement we used to have or with strategies that we wish were possible in a pre-figurative world that does not yet exist. We have to build that world and we have to build the base that will make that world come into being, the strategic alliance that will bring that into existence. I think we have to be a little self-critical that we just haven’t done it yet.

Kelly Hayes: I agree that we need to be real about where power exists right now, and about the power we do and don’t have, as things stand, to work our will. And I know this is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It’s one I’ve felt differently about at different points in my life, and I think that’s probably true for a lot of people who are listening. And I think it’s important to say that we don’t have to be entrenched in our positions around a tactic, or relitigate every choice we’ve ever made, or argument we’ve ever had. This authoritarian moment can really just be evaluated strategically, right here and now, and we can think about who it makes sense to try to wrestle some power and legitimacy away from right here and now, in an urgent way, wherever we can. Not everything has to be an absolute statement about how we feel about electoralism, or how it makes sense to engage with every election, now and forever.

But we often fall into the trap, I think, of feeling like we have to make absolute statements about things, or have end-all, be-all positions about what a tactic does or doesn’t mean to us. I think this is especially true about voting. There are extremes of fetishization around voting that I see among liberals and leftists. You see some liberals for whom it is the end all be all. It is everything. It is all they really think they owe the world politically.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: That’s right.

Kelly Hayes: And then sometimes you have leftists who fetishize non-participation as meaning things that I simply don’t think it means.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: Yeah, that’s right.

Kelly Hayes: Like, sometimes, I see people talk about not voting as though that refusal gives them clean hands, and........

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