E-Bikes & E-Scooters To Rescue Stranded Voters

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The all-important 2024 election cycle is heating up to the boiling point, and everyone is talking about getting voters to the polls. The micromobility-sharing firm Lime is going one step beyond. Instead of just talking about voting, they are also offering free rides to the polls on its e-bikes and e-scooters. Make that two steps beyond. Instead of waiting for Election Day to roll around, the free ride offer begins on Vote Early Day. Wait, what is Vote Early Day?

E-Bikes & E-Scooters Deployed For GOTV

Before we get to Vote Early Day, let’s note for the record that I’m a huge fan of e-bikes, and not just for urban travel and short hops. I used to have an 18-mile roundtrip five-days-a-week commute to an office job from a suburban town to a large city and back again, up and down hills including one long, last push up a mountain to home. It’s a small mountain, but it’s still officially a mountain. Doing it on a regular bicycle was out of the question, but for the last three years I used that route to test-drive e-bikes, and each of them performed marvelously.

If the weather was good I added another two miles to the commute, to take the long way home through a county park and a nature preserve. That route brought me up the back side of the mountain, which was even longer and steeper than the front side, but the e-bikes made it a pleasure (see my bike reviews here).

I also began using e-bikes to help me out during get-out-the-vote season. Going from one place to another to contact voters in my hilly town used to mean hopping in and out of the car or slogging around on foot to find the next stop on the map. E-bikes made the hills disappear and I could finish my route in a snap.

What Is Vote Early Day?

That brings us around to Vote Early Day. In most states, you don’t have to wait for Election Day to cast your ballot. Many states now have mail-in ballots that you can send in before Election Day. Also, all but a few states open up their polls for early voting in person, typically about 10 days before Election Day.

Early voting has been called a convenience, but it’s more than a convenience. It also helps equalize access to the polls. At some polling places on Election Day, voters can stroll right in at their leisure without waiting in line. Others are overcrowded and understaffed, with hours-long lines stretching for blocks. Early voting helps ensure that all voters have reasonable access to the polls.

Vote Early Day is celebrated on October 29. It’s a media-based civics project aimed at ensuring that voters know that they can vote in person before Election Day. It was originally launched by MTV during the first wave of Covid-19, when elections officials scrambled to cobble together an elections process without exposing voters to a deadly virus. The idea of celebrating Vote Early Day stuck, and the information-sharing effort currently involves thousands of partners including businesses, nonprofits, election administrators, and creative professionals along with media companies.

E-Bikes & E-Scooters To The Rescue

Still, early voting doesn’t solve all access problems. The number of early voting polling places is typically far lower than those designated for Election Day. In my county, for example, scores of polling places are open on Election Day. For early in-person voting, though, there are only eight locations. That means some voters have to travel farther than others to cast an early vote.

That’s where Lime’s e-bikes and e-scooters come in. In support of Vote Early Day, Lime is rolling out its “Lime To The Polls” voter information campaign in the US on October 29, a full week before Election Day. The meat of the offer is two free rides to the polls of up to 30 minutes each, for riders plugging in the code VOTE2024. If all goes according to plan, people will take advantage of the offer and bike or scoot to their early voting location instead of waiting for Election Day, but that remains to be seen.

Micromobility Is the Message

In a first-of-its-kind effort, Lime is also going to deploy its e-bikes and e-scooters to remind voters in several cities to register before the deadline in their state. The vehicles, wrapped with “When We All Vote” QR codes, are being fielded in cities that tend to have low voter turnout including Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, The Bronx, Milwaukee, Omaha, Salt Lake City, St. Paul, and Washington D.C.

Lime is also hoping that voters who are already registered will get the message that it’s important to check and make sure they are still registered. After all, elections officials routinely “purge” dead or otherwise inactive voters from their lists, and mistakes can happen.

In addition, in some states the purges have gone well beyond routine housekeeping. Republican lawmakers in Georgia, for example, passed a law this year empowering a single, ordinary individual to summarily challenge the registrations of thousands of voters, apparently with the idea that lower turnout favors Republican candidates.

Some elections analysts have observed that the idea of a turnout-based partisan advantage is not generally supported by the data. Still, the partisan divide has been sharpening along jurisdictional lines. When broken out into state and local elections, voter participation can make a difference.

Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something

Circling back around to that When We All Vote wrapping, deploying e-bikes and e-scooters to promote voter engagement may seem like a drop in the messaging bucket, and it is. However, those drops can add up.

With that in mind, check your registration status now, even if you never had a problem with your registration before.

If you’re eligible to vote but haven’t registered yet, do it now. Contact your local elections office to get instructions and forms.

If you plan to use a mail-in ballot, contact your local elections office to find out when you can expect to receive it. Contact them again if it doesn’t come by that date. Once you get it, fill it out and send it back immediately before it gets lost on your to-do list.

If your state has early voting days, find out where your early voting location is, and vote early. Getting to your early voting place on an e-bike, e-scooter, or other alternative means of transportation helps support the micromobility movement, too.

If you have any other tips or guidance for voters, drop a note in the comment thread. Better yet, tell your friends.

Find me on LinkTree, or @tinamcasey on Threads, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Image (cropped): The micromobility firm Lime is offering free rides on its e-bikes and e-scooters to help encourage voters to get to the polls as soon as early voting starts (courtesy of Lime via email).