In 2004 in the week before the election there were hundreds if not thousands of volunteers from other states in Northeastern Ohio to knock on doors to try to prevent another Florida. Below is the election story and conclusions from one of those volunteers. If you live in New York City, Chicago, D.C.,Boston, Baltimore, Louisville,El Paso, Cairo Illinois, Olathe Kansas, Gastonia South Carolina, Valdosta Georgia or Fargo North Dakota,you are minutes to a few hours from a state which could decide this election.
An Ohio Tale 2004
In 2004 Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwood, Ohio's Clarence Thomas, used every method at his disposal to suppress the vote in Democratic areas. Most ominous was the repeated, false announcement that if you voted in the wrong precinct by mistake you were committing a class five felony. Republicans announced that Republican vote watchers would be challenging the rights of voters at the polls. Calling local election officials was a bad answer to the confusion because voters received different and conflicting answers to the simple question "Where should someone who has recently moved should vote?" Unlike 2008 rules, in 2004 Ohio had a restrictive absentee voting system which required that a voter be absent or ill.
Ground zero of the ground war in Ohio was Cuyahoga County; Democrats had to win big and win with a big turnout in Cleveland to have a chance in Ohio. A Move On group I worked with had taken on seven precincts in the last two weeks of the campaign and the effort gathered momentum in the last five days with volunteers from California,Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Washington state. Kerry had an office in Shaker Heights just a few miles away, but I saw the first Kerry ground troop in the neighborhood Monday afternoon before the election. The world described on the voter registration rolls did not match the reality of boarded up houses in the east part of town. The person living in 103A, the second back door entrance past the driveway on the left for the back upstairs apartment was not Sandra Smith. but John Fielding who had moved from Hammond Street two months ago and thought he had voted at the Washington Elementary School in the last presidential election. Cell phone numbers had been disconnected or were no longer in service.
We had contacted in person slightly more than half the voters in "my" two precincts, which listed approximately 900 and 65 voters. Both the large and small precinct voted at the same location. The small precinct had two voting machines, the large precinct had four, naturally creating a line for the large precinct. Score one for Ken Blackwell's voter suppression campaign. The names of voters were supposed to be posted at 11:00 and 2:00 but in the chaos created by Blackwell and abetted by election bureaucracy no one knew whether the list would be posted, posted on time, or whether we would be allowed in the poll to copy the list. A local resident and I arrived at the poll in the drizzling rain at 6:30 in the morning to make a final pitch to arriving voters and to ask voters names so we could identify who hadn't voted. The plan was that my daughter would drive up from Oberlin at ten and some of her friends were scheduled to arrive around noon. Probably over half of the 4,000 students at Oberlin were scheduled to work for Kerry, America Coming Together ("ACT"), Ohio Vote or Move On.
Our precinct plan was that once the four or five students arrived we could spread out into the neighborhood and knock on the doors of committed voters who had not voted. The word was that our volunteers were still in line at the polls. Ken Blackwell had planned his voter suppression well in Oberlin. In a small, college town with 90% voter registration and a heated race, there were too few voting machines. In Ohio in 2004 the coincidence was that there were too few machines in Cleveland, in downtown Columbus, and in the small liberal arts college towns like Antioch and Oberlin. At Oberlin an impromptu jazz group from the conservatory played music and a local pizza parlor donated pizza to the would be election day volunteers in line waiting hours and hours. Score another win for Blackwell. The left gets creativity, the right gets power.
The Cavalry, our volunteers, arrived a little after three, with less than three hours of daylight left. We had been two volunteer short of being effective until three in the afternoon. By six it is dark and I couldn't say that I would open the door for a stranger at night in this neighborhood. We had less than three good hours to divide up the streets, the voter lists and sprint to the finish line. We believed that we were going to drag John Kerry and the DC Democrats who gave Bush a blank check in Iraq across the finish line.
Our efforts were not entirely in vain, each team of two contacted at least two to three voters who would not have voted and drove them to the polls in the rain. An eighteen year old girl was persuaded to vote for the first time one hour before the polls closed. Voter turnout was up twenty to thirty per cent over 2000 in seven precincts which four Bush years later were poorer, with fewer homeowners and more short-term residents.
The moral of this story is what every experienced door knocker knows. On election day logistics is everything. Computers crash, copy machines break down, voter lists can't be found, the campaign contact you dealt with broke her leg. The twenty somethings who are working their first campaign at headquarters will explain to you how this campaign has defeated Murphy's law,why this campaign is different, and you can put all your trust in headquarters. I hope they're right, but see for yourself. The following are rules for canvassers based on my experiences.
- Early vote or absentee vote. On election day vote first thing in the morning when opportunities for useful work are fewer.
- Think about making copies of voter lists you might use on election day. Make multiple copies of what you might need, someone else may need a copy. Smile at the headquarters people who tell you that everything will be in place and available on election day and they have it all figured out and you don't need to take any initiative. Headquarters staffers are often taught that volunteers in the field don't know anything. You haven't lost anything if the campaign has everything under control on election day.
- Take different types of campaign literature so you don't have to go back to headquarters. Even badly organized campaigns don't run out of literature. A 527 organization in 2004 sent volunteers to white working class neighborhoods with literature showing nothing but African American faces. Loraine County Ohio isn't Marin County.
- Be a good scout - wear good walking shoes, pens, bring an extra shirt, charge your cell phone and check the weather report. Bring a day bag, you will use it. Bring a map or your laptop, internet directions aren't always right.
- Bring water and food. Don't waste daylight looking for a 7/11 or standing in line at KFC. Remember Napoleon - an army marches on its stomach.
- Try to identify by name a person at the headquarters who might decide that part of his or her job is to support canvassers in the field like you. Report to that person potentially useful information from the field like the turnout looks low at noon in what should be a good precinct.
- Personally solve the problems of voters. Don't give them the number where they can find out where to vote, make the phone call for them. Car salesmen don't count on customers doing anything. Offer to give voters a ride to the polls or put them on your phone to talk to headquarters right now about getting a ride. First time and occasional voters are shy about asking for a ride.
- Teams of one man and one woman work well; it's safer and reassuring, particularly to single women voters being offered a ride to the polls.
- Offer to take inexperienced volunteers out canvassing with you.
- Don't waste time on nuts, drunks or hostile young men you recognize from last week's COPS.
- Act as if the election might be decided by 15 votes. Remember Florida. If 538 more votes had been counted for Al Gore, 4,500 Americans would still be alive today and the 700 billion dollar bailout would already be covered.