I’m picking up Democratic voters and taking them to the polls tomorrow for about 10-12 straight hours.
Anybody else here doing some election-day volunteering?
Driving to Toledo to do some GOTV, presumably door-knocking, possibly data gathering/entry. The wife was supposed to go too, but we couldn’t get a babysitter.
I’ll be part of the horde of lawyers descending on PA. But that sounds scarier than it is. We’re basically just legally-trained eyes and ears, reporting anything sketchy to the higher-ups and taking affidavits as necessary.
I do get to observe the behind-the-scenes counting and verification procedures, though, which I’m pretty excited about. I can’t promise a fair election nationally, but you can be sure that my precinct will have no funny business!
Had a 14-hour day yesterday. Obama won our county (Bexar County) 52-47%.
Democratic turnout was strong.
How did your night go, Richard?
In a word: messy.
Also an exhausting 14-hour shift. I covered 10 precincts.
There was not a lot of confusion over voter ID. Impressively, most people (who showed up at least), knew exactly what the deal was. I would say the voters beat the pollworkers on that front, but it was a non-factor in either direction.
The number of voters who were disenfranchised by other factors, however, was dishearteningly large. Philadelphia recently moved the precincts around; there was apparently some kind of behind-the-scenes clearing of the voter rolls; and late registrations would not properly added to the voter rolls. So a huge number of people actually had registration cards issued in the last two months, but could not vote either because they could not find the correct location or were not on the book when they got there. We tried to get most of them to cast provisional ballots, but many did not believe such ballots would be counted (with good reason) and left.
I would estimate that about 10% of people who showed up and were at least superficially eligible to vote did not vote. I had to console one 18-year-old first-time voter who was prevented from casting even a provisional ballot because her address update wasn’t processed correctly and had her living on the other side of the state.
So the big lesson for me is that Democrats have a lot of work to do to fix basic problems in PA at least. I really think way more people were disenfranchised by stupid, fixable issues than what voter ID could ever have accomplished.