Hey all,
So it's Sunday afternoon. John and I head back to Brooklyn shortly. Matt is staying through Tuesday (or maybe longer, Matt?).
Today, he's headed out with the van to shuttle people coming out of Sunday church services to the early voting center. There are just two days left before the last moment to register voters, so the push is on.
Our team, the Vote from Home folks, have a headquarters—base camp—in a residential neighborhood in the Southeast part of the city. About fifteen people have been staying in this tiny house. And since they landed more than a month ago, they've developed a well oiled machine that. We told you in our first update that the group was hoping to get 10,000 people registered, and encourage as many of them as possible to request an absentee ballot.
We gathered together in the compound on Thursday night to watch the Palin-Biden debate on their big flatscreen TV they've rented, and Marc, one of the masterminds behind the organization, said he had an announcement to make. He read out loud from an e-mail he had sent to a few friends earlier this year: "If we get 10 people to register 10 people a day for 10 weeks, we could register 10,000 people in Ohio." He read his friend's response: "That's a perfect number, considering McCain said we could be in Iraq for another 10,000."
The idea is to try to register as many people as possible before Monday, which is the last day to register in Ohio. As we've been registering people, we've also been entering their names and contact information into a self-designed massive database. Then, between now and Election Day, the group plans to follow up with each and one of the people on the lists to make sure that they got their absentee ballot (if they asked for one), or that they've made it down to early vote, or that they head out on Election Day. In other words, every single person who we register, we hope, will also be voting.
I'll share just a couple of the sweetest moments for us: Yesterday, John and I were tasked with heading out to track down problem cases – missing registrations, no social security numbers, no date of birth, that kind of thing. Our first stop was at Grant Hospital downtown—the maternity ward. When we got to Room 543 we knocked and a quiet voice invited us in. A young woman was sitting up in bed, beaming. Between her outstretched legs was her 12-hour old baby, Julian, bundled in blankets. As she signed her registration form, we chatted with her friend, cooed over her Buddha-esque baby, and thanked her for calling us. She would be out of the hospital tomorrow at the earliest and she told us that if we hadn't shown up, she would not have been able to vote.
After the hospital visit, we headed out to an address on Kelton Street. From the partially filled out registration, we noticed that the woman we were looking for was born in 1932. In a neighborhood east of downtown, we pulled up in front of a modest house. Through her screen door, I (Anna) could see Virginia sitting on her couch. She was surrounded by stacks of opened mail, magazines, a can of soda. Her walker was at her feet. She called for me to come in. Visibly shaking, Virginia started apologizing for her condition –Parkinson's, they think, she said. She gestured for me to sit down beside her, and together we finished filling out her registration and absentee ballot. When it was time to sign, I held the clipboard, and slowly – letter-by-letter – she shakily signed: Virginia Alston. (Note to Ross: Please check in on her and see if she needs help with that absentee ballot!)
Another one of my favorite moments was when Matt and I went to one of the halfway houses, this one for women coming out of jail. When we got to Alvis House, the manager said there was only one woman who wanted to get taken down to the early voting and registration center. So Matt and I piled back into our 9-seater van with a forty-something woman from the shelter named Candace—or Candy as she said we should call her. On our way to the voting center she shared with us why she was voting for Barack Obama and we talked about the economy as we drove by some of the boarded up houses on Bryden Road. We waited with the van, while she went inside to register and vote. When we got back to Alvis House, we were saying our goodbyes and I admit, I was still feeling like maybe we hadn't really done much, just clocking one vote. That's when she said: "I just want to thank you two. You just helped a first-time voter."
I suppose in an abstract way I've always understood that the voting laws are designed to make it hardest for poor people to vote, but I only really fully understand it now through this experience. Since voting registration is tied to addresses, who are the people who have to re-register every election? They're the folks who get evicted, those who get foreclosed on. They're the women who have to head to battered women's shelters, or the young people who bounce for home to home. They're the men and women convicted of big crimes (and little ones) who find themselves in and out of jail. These are the people who have to re-register every year, not the families with 30 year mortgages who live in one home their whole lives. And these are many of the people that our group helped to register and transport to the early voting center in Columbus.
Love,
Matt, Anna, and John
No comments:
Post a Comment