On the Ground in Detroit: A Firsthand Account of Volunteer Safety, Leadership Failures, and Dark Money in Voter Outreach

DETROIT, MI — As a candidate for public office running on an anti-money-in-politics platform, I believe that true democracy requires authentic community representation and grounded, face-to-face voter engagement. To gain more door-knocking experience and support voter outreach in a city with deep personal roots—where my father and grandfather were born and where members of my family still reside—I recently volunteered for a get-out-the-vote effort in Detroit with Seed the Vote, an organization partnered with Michigan United, a 501(c)(4) super PAC. What I experienced on the ground was a stressful, disorganized campaign marked by serious leadership failures, compromised volunteer safety, and fundamental campaign finance contradictions.

The travel coordination was poorly managed from the start. I booked a room at the Holiday Inn where the volunteer cohort was staying, but did not receive final confirmation from the Seed the Vote support team until the literal day I was supposed to leave. That delay forced me to miss my direct train to Detroit, rerouting me through Toledo with a 3:00 AM, four-hour layover before I finally reached Detroit on Thursday morning.

Upon arriving at the hotel Thursday morning, I sat at breakfast next to members of Seed the Vote leadership who were speaking with a newly arrived volunteer—a Black social justice advocate from New York. During breakfast, a member of Seed the Vote leadership repeatedly used the N-word during conversation with him, even after the advocate explicitly requested that he not use that word.

When I arrived at the Seed the Vote office, the disarray was overwhelming. During canvassing in a majority-Black Detroit neighborhood, that same leadership member walked uninvited into a resident’s home. The household confronted the team, flashing firearms and demanding that volunteers stay out of the neighborhood, threatening violence if they returned. Rather than addressing this severe safety breakdown openly, Seed the Vote leadership attempted to hide and table volunteer concerns. Later that day, leadership redirected volunteers to Boston-Edison—a predominantly white neighborhood—framing it as "safer." Many Black volunteers expressed strong discomfort with this decision, pointing out that a majority-white neighborhood is not inherently safer for Black volunteers.

"Democratic participation requires more than good intentions; it demands competence, accountability, and respect for the communities whose doors we knock. When national groups deploy out-of-town volunteers without adequate local knowledge, misuse basic field technology, or dismiss serious safety concerns, they treat neighborhood organizing like an abstract exercise rather than a human responsibility."

The field operations were equally chaotic. Standard campaign field strategy uses the MiniVAN application to assign "turf" packets to pairs of 1–2 volunteers. Instead, Seed the Vote routinely assigned 4–6 volunteers to the exact same turf. MiniVAN was created to replace printed paper lists, not as a live, multi-user real-time coordination tool. This created app syncing glitches, duplicate door-knocks, confusion, and friction among volunteers.

There was also a glaring lack of neighborhood instruction. Most volunteers had been brought in from out of state—specifically Northern California and the West Coast—and knew almost nothing about Detroit’s geography or communities. While I do not claim exhaustive expertise on Detroit, I grew up visiting family here often with my Detroit-born father, giving me basic neighborhood familiarity. Many older white volunteers were sent into majority-Black neighborhoods completely unprepared for the community dynamics.

During one canvassing shift, after being dropped off with my partner, I paused to orient myself and update turf data on my phone. A resident began yelling at me through her Ring camera. As we walked down the block, a man came outside, pursued us on foot, and then got into a white minivan, following us slowly down the street. We called our team for pickup, and the white minivan tailed us until we reached the expressway back to the office.

When I brought these operational, safety, and cultural concerns directly to the Seed the Vote team, leadership responded aggressively and asked me not to volunteer with their organization again. It is deeply disappointing that an organization claiming to empower voters would treat volunteer safety with such neglect, and even more disappointing that they partner with a 501(c)(4) super PAC—the exact dark-money entity my campaign works to limit.

As a retired CPA with years of political reporting and compliance experience, I know there are ways to organize that strictly align with money-out-of-politics values. Furthermore, Seed the Vote volunteer materials contained a glaring error, claiming a mission to "get 527s out of politics." In reality, Section 527 organizations pre-date Citizens United and mandate full public disclosure of donors and expenditures. By attacking transparent 527s while operating alongside undisclosed 501(c)(4) super PACs, Seed the Vote misinforms volunteers and protects dark money interests.

"In Washington and across national political operations, money has become the primary language of politics. It distorts representation and creates a distance between the governor and the governed. If we want a representative democracy that functions for working people, we have to model those principles in how we campaign. That means centering local voices, protecting the people who give their time to the work, and rejecting dark money structures."

I met so many wonderful people while volunteering in Detroit. The grassroots volunteers’ hearts and minds are in the right place, but unfortunately, the leadership of Seed the Vote is not. We must cut through big-money advertising and get back to a fact-based representative democracy where decisions are made for the good of the community, not with money in mind.

🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹