Union group runs voter registration drive in West Baltimore (death of Freddie Gray)

[Omaha Steve]

By Carrie Wells The Baltimore Sun May 30, 2015

Joe Cox and David Otoo knocked on doors up and down Windsor Avenue and canvassed the football fields of Frederick Douglass High School on Saturday, hoping to register citizens to vote at a time when community activists say West Baltimore's residents need a larger voice in their government.

As it turned out, most of those who they spoke to said they were already registered, and the challenge for some would be persuading them to vote. In the parking lot of Frederick Douglass, while parents and grandparents of football uniform-clad teenagers rushed around, one woman on a cellphone hollered back at Cox and Otoo's question of whether she was registered to vote.

"Yeah, I don't vote though," she responded.

The voter drive was organized by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in response to the civil unrest in late April and early May after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in police custody. The organizers targeted the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, where Gray was arrested. AFSCME Maryland has done voter registration efforts before, but the unrest "put it into hyperdrive," said Patrick Moran, president of the union group.

FULL story at link.