Your Vote, Your Voice

Alice Schaffer Smith ’61 has countless stories from a life spent in public service, but there’s one that’s particularly memorable. When Jimmy Carter entered the presidential race in the mid-1970s, one of the calls he made was to Smith, who had been heavily involved in the Palo Alto League of Women Voters and had served as chair of the Mid-Peninsula chapter of the ACLU of Northern California. Carter’s request: Would she run the California office of his presidential campaign?

“He was very engaging,” Smith recalls, “but I said to him, ‘Look, I’m a single mother, I’m in law school. I would love to do it, but I can’t. Not at this time.’”

To this day, Smith often looks back and wonders if she made the right decision. But saying no to a future president actually accelerated her entry into the world of law and voting rights advocacy.

“You Need to Trust Yourself”

One of a long line of Smithies (her mother, twin sister, older sister, and daughter are also alums), Smith had a hard time adjusting to her courses and college life, so much so that at one point, she considered dropping out.

“I had a lot to live up to, and I had never trusted myself,” she says. That uncertainty was only exacerbated by challenging coursework and a derogatory professor. It wasn’t until she took a seminar with Thomas Mendenhall, professor of history and sixth president of Smith College, that she started to see glimpses of her own potential.

“I included an idea I wasn’t sure about in a paper he graded, and I thought, ‘Oh, I should take that out, he won’t like that,’” she recalls. “But he read it and told me, ‘That’s a great observation and a good idea to think more about. You need to trust yourself.’”

Smith took his advice to heart, diving into a history major and getting her first taste of activism by running a mock election campaign for presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson—ultimately leading to his victory over Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy in a mock campus election. After graduating from Smith and eventually earning her law degree from Golden Gate University School of Law in 1977, Smith began a career that included stints as a staff attorney, legal consultant, and general counsel while volunteering with the Human Rights Watch, League of Women Voters of Palo Alto, Red Cross, and Amnesty International before retiring in 2008. For all intents and purposes, she’d set herself up for a quieter time with less community service work and more focus on birding and spending time with her grandchildren.

And then came 2016.

“We Just Keep Going”

On Election Day 2016, Smith was running a precinct in Palo Alto, helping voters check in and cast their votes. After a long day, Smith turned on her cell phone to see not only the election results, but footage of thousands of people who hadn’t been able to cast their votes. “I was watching folks in Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, all standing in these long lines, and I remember thinking, ‘How can this be? This can’t be right,’” she recalls. “People were denied their right to vote, and it woke me up. I had been birding, being sociable and a granny and all that … I knew nothing about what was happening.”

That realization inspired her to start the National Voter Corps.

With a simple motto—Every voter counts, and every vote is counted—the National Voter Corps is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and connects volunteers to nonpartisan organizations looking for help with their voter programs and offers resources to help educate voters on their rights and make sure they’re registered to participate in elections. The corps hosts letter writing campaigns, voter registration drives, regular community presentations, and events helping veterans, the unhoused, and other vulnerable populations ensure that they’re registered to vote.

“You just try and connect with as many people as you can, and if they get excited and they share that, it’s great. We just keep going,” Smith says of her work. “I’m impassioned to do something.”

Election interference through vote suppression is one of the most urgent problems Smith and the National Voter Corps are tackling. She points to the inconsistency of voter ID laws as one example of how complicated and deeply rooted the issue is.

“Picture IDs aren’t universally available,” Smith says. “In some states, if you don’t drive and aren’t in school, you have to go to the Registrar of Voters Office or the DMV and get an official state ID picture, which costs time and money, two things not everyone has. Some states only provide these services for a few hours a week or month, which makes obtaining one truly burdensome.” Other states, she continues, require proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate, to register to vote. It doesn’t just cost money to get a certified copy of a birth certificate; in segregated states, Black Americans weren’t allowed to give birth in some hospitals, meaning that in these cases birth certificates weren’t always filed correctly or at all.

Smith is determined to preserve the sanctity of voting, and spends much of her time educating voters about issues like gerrymandering and political corruption before assisting them with the process of demystifying and casting their ballots. Because the National Voter Corps is a nonpartisan organization, however, her efforts can sometimes lead to votes being cast for politicians who oppose her efforts.

According to Smith, that’s exactly what she wants.

“We may not share the same beliefs, but my view is that that is not the issue here,” she says. “Democracy demands everyone have a fair vote, regardless of who they vote for. That’s an absolute, and that’s what we’re working for.”

Though Smith is devoting much of her attention these days to the upcoming presidential election, she’s open to keeping the National Voter Corps going as an independent organization beyond November 6. Until then, Smith is focused on a single fact: Everyone deserves the right to vote—no matter whose name they mark on the ballot.

“I want everyone to have equal access to the voting booth, and every vote counted fairly,” she says. “I don’t want to live in fear or kowtow to an authoritarian dictatorship. We need to protect our democracy, and we have to provide the resources for people to make their voices heard.”