Melody McCurtis and Danell Cross start their day early on a recent sunny Sunday morning going door to door in their neighborhood northwest of downtown Milwaukee. Leaders of the nonprofit Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, the mother and daughter make their way slowly along the route wearing masks and using a bullhorn to maintain distancing as they offer free food, household supplies — and information about how to vote. At one home, the pair corner a young woman who prefers not to be named, dressed in a soiled apron and a black polo shirt as she heads to work. McCurtis and Cross know that if not for their efforts, she probably will not vote on Nov. 3. “I don’t believe in voting. I feel like the higher-ups, they gonna pick the president,” she says, throwing up her hands. After a few minutes, the woman finally concedes that she may vote, if only to get the pair off her porch. Cross tells her she will call again, and if she doesn’t pick up, they will be back at her front door. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! “You got to get on her,” McCurtis tells her mother. “I got to,” Cross says. “I gotta follow her.” Metcalfe Park: Black Vote Rising is a 10-minute documentary produced by 371 Productions, in collaboration with The Intercept and Wisconsin Watch. The film follows Melody McCurtis and Danell Cross as they raise voter awareness in their Milwaukee community of Metcalfe Park. Four years ago, lower turnout among Black voters in Milwaukee was named as a factor in President Donald Trump’s narrow 22,748-vote win over Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin. McCurtis and Cross are working to ensure that what happened to Milwaukee’s Black voters in the 2016 election does not get repeated. An investigation based on leaked documents from the Trump campaign shows it used demographic data to systematically dissuade voters in Milwaukee’s primarily Black neighborhoods from participating in the election. The Channel 4 News analysis of the data found that Black voters made up a disproportionate share of the group identified as “deterrence” voters, or voters they sought to dissuade through Facebook ads. In one Milwaukee voting ward, where 80% of the inhabitants are Black, 44% were marked for deterrence, the British news outlet found. Of that group, only 36% turned out to vote, according to the Channel 4 News analysis. Brad Parscale, former senior advisor to the Trump campaign, denied in a 2018 PBS FRONTLINE interview that the campaign ever targeted the Black community. These are not the only efforts that keep some people in the state from voting. Wisconsin — once one of the easiest states in which to vote — has steadily made it harder in the past decade under Republican control. Voter ID. Shorter early voting windows. Extra hoops for college voters to jump through. Those and other hurdles disproportionately affect people of color, people with disabilities and college students. These are all steps Wisconsin’s Republican-run Legislature has taken in the name of preventing widespread voter fraud — a threat that experts agree is practically nonexistent. Andrew Hitt, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, defends these new laws in the name of election integrity. “The policies that have been put in place are to make sure that there is no cheating, that there is no unfair practices going on,” Hitt said. He disputes the mountain of research showing fraud is a rare problem, saying those studies are biased. “We have documented instances of voter fraud over the years,” Hitt said. Jay Urban is an attorney representing plaintiffs with disabilities in one of four federal cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to change rules for the November election to make voting easier during the pandemic. When asked to provide evidence of fraud, Republicans who intervened in the case were unable to do it, he said. “I don’t think they are worried about that (fraud),” Urban said. “They’re sending a message that they don’t want certain votes to be cast. They don’t want certain votes to be counted. … They’re about math. More votes hurts their chances of keeping power.” That is the calculation that McCurtis and Cross are fighting against. Cross agreed — voting is about power. “I’m voting for Black life,” she said. “I’m voting for public officials to understand that Black votes do matter, and that they need to pay attention. And as we get our community invested in voting and building up that voting bloc … they gonna have to pay attention.” Just in Gov. Scott Walker’s first term, the Republican-run Legislature passed 33 election law changes, according to a 2015 analysis by the Cap Times.