On November 3, 2024, I was in Montgomery, Alabama on one of my first work trips for the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) monitoring poll sites. My assigned poll sites were in a new Congressional District as a result of successful LDF litigation that would give Black voters a chance at fair representation. As I drove to poll sites in community centers, churches, fire houses, tornado shelters, and trailers, I applied skills from my first few months as a Policy Fellow to explain complicated election rules to voters and to make recommendations about future advocacy to mitigate issues seen in the field. LDF’s election protection training for volunteers gave me a crash course on important election rules in Alabama and walked through a variety of scenarios, some of which I definitely dealt with on Election Day in terms of accessibility issues.
In 2022, answering a volunteer call for law school students, I monitored the 866-Our-Vote hotline to help voters during early voting periods across the country. During my hotline shifts, I relied on the basic lawyering skills of triaging issues, applying the law to the facts, researching legal guidance and rules from my first year and a half of law school. I was surprised by how in depth the in-depth 866-Our-Vote training equipped me to assist voters regardless of if they were calling in from Michigan or Pennsylvania. In both of my election protection experiences, it was satisfying to apply my legal background to help people exercise their civic duty of voting.
In 2026, I am once again preparing to be in the field for the November election, but this time I will be leading LDF’s work in Georgia. For more than a decade, LDF’s Black Voters on the Rise (BVOTR) project has worked to advance voting rights and support Black political engagement through advocacy, legislation, litigation, and year round election protection work.
LDF deploys election protection teams in our target states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. These teams consist of LDF staff and volunteers just like you. You can participate in our democracy this November not just by voting, but also by protecting the right to vote. Our teams monitor hotlines to identify and remove barriers to voting; provide nonpartisan guidance and information to voters; and assist at all stages of voting from registration to absentee and early voting to Election Day and after.
Credit: Candace Dame Chambers for LDF
Someone with a legal background might be particularly equipped to be a poll monitor because you know how to listen for issues, distill information, and problem solve. Follow this link to join LDF in the fight to protect voting rights. If you are not in our target states or cannot travel to them, feel free to check out opportunities with 866-Our-Vote, the national, nonpartisan Election Protection coalition which LDF is a part of.
Election season is also a great time to spread nonpartisan information about voting. In fact, this week is National Voter Education Week, an open-source, nonpartisan voter education campaign that equips voters with the tools and information they need to cast a ballot with confidence. If you are working with new voters, such as 18 year olds or recently naturalized citizens, check out this resource to help answer common questions for new voters around eligibility to vote, registering to vote, and how to vote. There are potentially 8.5 million new voters ages 18-19 this year! If you are a law student, a college student, or working with these types of students, this student voting roadmap is a useful resource to make sure you can cast your ballot no matter where you are for school.
With less than a month until the November General Election:
Make sure you have a voting plan–when, where and how are you voting?
If you have PTO available, think seriously about using it to be a poll monitor. Again, you can sign up here.
If you are looking to meet a community service hours’ goal, poll monitoring during early voting and/or on Election Day is a perfect opportunity for you.
And, if you aren’t able to be in the field yourself, send this blog to a friend, a family member, or neighbor and encourage them to help voters make sure their vote is counted this November.
Our democracy takes all of us participating in any way that we can. As LDF’s founder Thurgood Marshall is known to say, “Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on."
Imani Brooks serves as a Policy Counsel at LDF. In this role, Imani primarily focuses on the organization’s political participation efforts and is engaged in numerous State Voting Rights Act coalitions across the country. She has successfully advocated for the enacted of State Voting Rights Acts in Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware and has led successful introduction efforts in Louisiana and Georgia. Imani brings legal and policy experience to her role following her clerkship at the Court of Appeals of Virginia and internship at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She is a graduate of American University Washington College of Law, where she was a staff member for the Journal on Gender, Social Policy and the Law, led the If When How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice chapter, and provided pro bono legal services on the Navajo Reservation. Imani received her B.A. in International Studies from Emory University.
While at Emory, Imani became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. (DST) through the Omicron Xi chapter as the youngest member in the chapter’s history. For DST, she served on the National Programming, Planning and Development Committee for five years for and is now a Member-at-Large in the South Atlantic Region.