Democracy Week

Election Day Blues and Reds

By Melinda Tuhus

I participated in Election Protection in Reading, Pa. It was a non-partisan effort to protect people’s right to vote, targeting areas that had experienced voter fraud or intimidation in previous elections. These were mostly in communities of color. (Surprise!) I drove down from Hamden, Conn., with my friend Sue. Both of us, being Spanish speakers, volunteered to staff precincts with large Latino populations in a city that was under court order to provide ballots in Spanish and election interpreters because of previously documented discrimination against Puerto Ricans.

As we drove through Reading, we saw nothing but Kerry signs. We did our training that night along with a few hundred other volunteers from states all over the northeast quadrant of the U.S. Dozens of lawyers were having their own training at a separate site. Remember, all these people were to cover just 20 or so precincts in the city of Reading, population 81,000.

Organizers divided the volunteers into three shifts. Sue and I each took the second and third shifts, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., when the polls closed. That gave us time for a morning walk, and from our motel we strolled through a golf course and then to a school, where people were waiting around 8:30 a.m. in a line that an earlier voter estimated would take an hour to get through. One harried young woman said she couldn’t wait an hour -- she had an infant at home and had to relieve the baby-sitter. That was my first inkling that long lines on election day might disenfranchise a lot of people. Long lines (or any lines) are something I’ve experienced just once during my entire voting life over the past 35 years.

Sue and I arrived at our adjacent sites and met our fellow election protectors and poll-watchers. At mine, there was a gauntlet of volunteers -- three English-speaking protectors (from one family) in their black t-shirts that said in huge letters, “You have a right to vote.” Then me in my hideous XXL red t-shirt that said the same thing in Spanish. Then an Election Protection attorney, and two Latino attorneys volunteering for the Kerry campaign. It was mind-boggling that the Kerry campaign had so many lawyers at its disposal that it could afford to put two in one little precinct (with 1,100 registered voters.) One did energy law, one immigration law, and our non-partisan attorney did personal injury law. I asked him if the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (those folks the Bushies love to hate) had pulled out all the stops getting their members on board for Kerry/Edwards. He said he didn’t know -- he had dropped his membership when he found the group unhelpful.

I was working with folks from Philadelphia, D.C., New Jersey and New York. And then there was Bill, an old local Democratic activist, who strategically placed his folding chair in front of the windows behind him holding all the Republicans’ election signs, while the Democrats’ signs were on the opposite side of the doors. The only thing in front of them was his three-foot-long, to scale, oil tanker truck on the sidewalk with a little hand-lettered sign taped on that said, “Because it really was about oil -- Vote Kerry.”

The weather was unbelievably lovely -- it was sunny almost all day, no wind, and the high was around 60. I was thankful for that every minute.

We had flyers listing Pennsylvanians’ voting rights in Spanish and English, which we offered to everyone entering the polls. It turned out the information about ex-felons’ right to vote in Pa. was not at all clear. We finally determined that anyone convicted of a felony who is out of prison, even if still on parole or probation, can vote. We were told the opposite in our training the night before.

Not everyone accepted the flyers, and it was clear that some voters resented our being there, keeping an eye on things -- some even said that everyone who voted in America should learn to speak English.

But most people were pretty friendly and some were talkative. A few who stand out: One young woman, 21, said it was her first time voting. “I’m a little nervous,” she said. I think she was worried that she’d screw up her vote on the electronic voting machine. But she did fine and on the way out she said she was happy to have voted, and she thanked all the volunteers for being out there, and “making a difference.”

*We always asked people as they were leaving if they had voted okay, and one young black man said, “No.” I asked why and he said he didn’t have time, he had to go to work. I asked him how much time he had, he said, “Ten minutes,” and then I was able to tell him that we’d been timing voters and ten minutes was all it took. So he went back in, a little reluctantly, but came out smiling 10 or 15 minutes later. He was an example of the group of people most likely to be disenfranchised by long waits -- working class people with no job flexibility. When the wait stretched to a an hour or two in some parts of Pennsylvania -- or to eight hours in some parts of Ohio -- it was easy to see how some folks never got to vote.

*I escorted one older black woman to her car after she voted because she was in obvious pain and having trouble walking. As she got in, she said, “Nothing was going to stop me from voting today.” I was touched by her commitment and perseverance. It reminded me of a poster I’d seen years before in a Black activist’s home in Boston: “Vote. Lots of us died trying.”

One young woman ran in five minutes before the polls closed, panting, “I came all the way from New York to vote.”

We had no major or even many minor problems at our precinct. The only glitch was that the election officials seemed to be asking more people than necessary for identification -- it was only required for first-time voters or for those who had just moved into the precinct -- but no one was prevented from voting because of that. Our lawyer went in and asked about it, and that seemed to cut down on the problem.

Of course, the larger issue is that the entire state of Pennsylvania was voting using touch screen electronic voting machines with no paper print-out.

At the end of the day I spoke to a lawyer for Election Protection who was overseeing the state of Pennsylvania. He said while there were a few instances of voter intimidation (like college students in Philadelphia receiving flyers that if they voted there [as opposed to where they’d come from] they’d lose their financial aid!) and some instances of new voters being required to vote by provisional ballot when they were listed on the rolls and therefore should have voted on the machines, the problems were resolved pretty quickly.

We went to sleep around 11:30 p.m., without knowing the results either in Pennsylvania or in the US as a whole, and woke up to a pretty big win for Kerry in Pennsylvania and Ohio leaning significantly toward Bush. We listened to the radio for the first couple of hours of the drive home, until it was pretty clear that Bush was the winner. Then we turned off the news and turned on the 20-year-old tape of Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near, singing songs of hope and struggle. We’ve got a lot of struggles ahead of us, so we need all the hope we can get.

I’m not surprised at the outcome. I didn’t believe Bush and Co. would ever give up power voluntarily. And while it’s true that many millions of Americans really did vote for him, I’m sure it’s also true that legions more Americans would have voted against him if they could have -- if they had more time to wait in line, if they’d been allowed to cast a regular, not provisional, ballot. And then there’s the questionable validity of votes cast on electronic machines without paper trails, especially given the statement earlier by the president of Diebold (one of the makers of the machine) that he promised to “deliver the country for Bush.” Could be that’s exactly what happened. I hope someday we will know.

When I think of specific horrible outcomes likely because of the Bush victory, I can feel pretty depressed and immobilized. But I also feel energized, like now (just like during the campaign) there’s plenty of work to do and many wonderful people with whom to do it. I’ve got lots of story ideas and am also interested in reaching out to people who don’t necessarily share my views -- like my brother!