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By Zerline Hughes Spruill
Reuben and I voted yesterday, online, from a cruise ship off the coast of Mexico, so we figured our civic contribution for the year was done. It wasn’t. A colleague connected me to a temp agency and employment firm, and late last week when a gig came through that had nothing to do with writing or communications (admin and tech support for DJs at the Polls), I took it, then told a friend and my husband.
DJs at the Polls places local DJs outside voting sites to turn Election Day into something closer to a party. The DJs set up in compliance with legal restrictions near polling locations, which is why you’ll find them outside rather than next to the booths. The approach scales: in the 2024 general election, the group deployed over 3,200 local DJs to 5,954 polling locations across 11 states.
Our job today is to keep those DJs on track: confirming they’ve arrived or flagging who’s running late, checking on their safety, checking them in online when they can’t, troubleshooting generators, and helping them handle when police approach to ask what they’re doing there. We’re doing it from our sea terrace cabin on Virgin Voyages’ Brilliant Lady, six days into a 17-day sailing to Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala. We started working from the bed having started at 5:45 a.m. ship time to cover the East Coast. We then gravitated to the hammock and the desk to take and make calls, send texts and discuss challenges amongst other remote workers and volunteers helping to troubleshoot.
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The math: Wi-Fi strong enough for the work costs $80 for 24 hours. (We needed RingCentral and Zoom which isn’t covered under our included premium internet package). Nonetheless, it balances out.
The lesson, if there is one: remote work is less about where you are and more about what you’re willing to do, no matter how far it sits from your expertise or comfort, as long as training is available. Ask me anything about it in the comments.
Today’s calls weren’t all generators and late arrivals. A few DJs reached out because police were posted near their sites and they didn’t feel safe, which is a problem on its own and a legal one in many states, where law enforcement isn’t supposed to be stationed at polling places unless called. A few churches serving as polling sites weren’t thrilled to have a DJ out front, either, and politely asked them to leave. None of that surprised me. I’ve spent years in voting rights work, on the disenfranchisement and re-enfranchisement of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, knocking on doors in Florida for get-out-the-vote efforts and trying to get people in Florida, Missouri and Pennsylvania invested in their own elections, and the obstacles rarely look dramatic. They look like an officer standing where they shouldn’t, or a polite request to pack up and go.
Long before any of that, I was a kid riding around South Central Los Angeles with my mom and dad when Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1988, a bullhorn in the car carrying his voice down every street we could cover. (I wrote about that here.) Decades later, the bullhorn is an $80-a-day Wi-Fi package, the car is a cabin bed off the coast of Mexico, and I’m still helping get people to the polls. Leaving the country never ended my stake in what happens there, and today proved I can still show up for it from a boat headed to Guatemala.
We’re skipping the results tonight. Reuben and I have a ship load of activities to get to, probably starting with a cocktail to toast a long day and the DJs who kept the music playing.
