MIAMI, FLORIDA — The seats of The Love Bus are draped with colorful fabric and pillows, and the windows are painted so onlookers can’t see inside. Beside the entrance, items scattered across the front seat provide everything you need for a good time: information about your rights as a voter.
The Love Bus, a converted school bus painted by Miami-area immigrants, is providing largely-minority voters with rides to the polls across South Florida. Dreamed up by a coalition of nonprofit organizations, the project is attempting to provide a bright spot in a year of divisive politics and toxic rhetoric.
“The campaign has had a negative message and we wanted to offer something different to people,” Ruth Moreno, regional coordinator for iAmerica Action, told ThinkProgress on board The Love Bus. “Miami is big on art, big on culture, big on merging the two… so we thought, why not get a school bus and commission Miami-based artists to paint it to take that message of unity and solidarity and community to the streets.”
So far, the bus has driven roughly 100 people to their polling places and has informed countless others about the importance of voting. With early vote totals in Florida — especially among Latinos in South Florida — setting records, the bus is just one part of a large get-out-the-vote initiative being run by countless organizations.
But unlike traditional GOTV efforts, The Love Bus understands social media. At a rally in Homestead, Florida on Saturday, people snapped photos standing next to the brightly colored paintings and posted them with the project’s hashtag online.
The bus has focused on heavily-minority communities, like Homestead, which is majority Latino. On Saturday, it also stopped by an AFL-CIO rally and a block party in Little Haiti, a neighborhood home to many Haitian immigrants.
In each neighborhood, Moreno said that advocates are trying to mobilize voters around issues like immigration reform, which is foremost on many Floridians’ minds.
“You see the raids that are happening, you know people that are being directly impacted by the immigration system,” she said. “We’ll take you to the polls, but let that be your incentive.”
The bus has also stopped at Florida Memorial University, a historically black campus, where students were able to get a ride to the polls between classes.
On Saturday, Homestead residents peeked inside the bus, picking up pamphlets with information about the partner organizations and voter protection information. But nothing on the bus will tell people who they should vote for.
“That was intentional,” Moreno said. “We wanted it to be a positive message.”
People riding the bus, however, will frequently talk about who they’re supporting. “We’re not guiding the conversation any which way, but there’s a lot at stake and the implications of this election are real,” Moreno said. “They’re not afraid to talk about it.”
The bus has also appealed to people who are not engaged in politics and who may otherwise not have turned out to vote. With the polls exceedingly close in Florida, those people could decide who takes the White House.
“It might come down, yet again, to Florida and a few thousand votes,” Moreno said. “For a state with two dozen million people, it’s very tight.”