Observations from Election 2004 – on the ground in Washington, PA.

Since I became a grad student at USC’s film school ten years ago, I have worn a full beard. The beard began as a joke. My class was shown a documentary about 70’s film-makers, and the narrator read – “they were all young and wore a beard.” I thought it was time for some more film-makers like that. So it was a surprise to a lot of my friends last week when I shaved off my beard. I did it because I was heading off to South-Western Pennsylvania to volunteer on the Kerry-Edwards campaign for election day. You see, I live in Los Angeles, and I make horror films. I guess that makes me part of that Hollywood “elite” you heard them complaining about at the Republican convention (which I found strange considering that Arnold Schwarznegger is about as representative of the Hollywood “elite” as anyone I’ve ever met, and so was Ronald Reagan). But with my “film director” beard, I was afraid that people would see a “liberal” coming at them from fifty feet and flee in the other direction. You see, I was hoping to convince some of the so-called undecided voters in a swing state to vote for Kerry, by going door to door and talking with them. That was my plan, anyway.

The whole thing was a departure for me. I’ve never been very political. I originally registered to vote as an independent. I’ve always considered myself as a “classical liberal” who believed in equality and liberty for all men and women, period. But over the last four years, I’ve found myself both pulled and pushed towards the Democratic party. I don’t like the fact that the Iraq War was begun almost unilaterally, and I don’t like how it has been managed (or mismanaged). I’m for the separation of Church and state. I’m pro-choice. I’m for some more spending on education and a more equal health care system. And I don’t think that tax cuts during wartime make much sense – that’s how you get a huge deficit. And as the election came nearer, I felt myself growing frustrated with watching from the sidelines. The upcoming election just seemed too important and too much was at stake – the above issues, plus what I saw as a fomenting of a cultural war at home by the President as well as the future direction of the Supreme Court were enough to drive me to passionate activism. So, along with another friend from California, we called the DNC and offered to go to whatever battleground state we were most needed as volunteers. The answer came back – Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania. We decided against Florida, since we felt that the 2000 election would bring a lot of outside focus there. Then, we talked to the volunteer organizer in Pennsylvania and felt like this was the place for us.

Now, my friend is a lawyer and I am not. He received an e-mail about volunteering for the legal team for Kerry-Edwards and signed up for Pennsylvania. But, since we were traveling together, I was found myself pulled into the Kerry-Edwards Democratic Legal Protection Team as a matter of practicality (we only had one car between us). In the interest of full disclosure, I first have to admit that my wife is a lawyer, so I might be positively biased towards them. The media characterized the Kerry-Edwards lawyers as a “storm of locusts,” but as a non-lawyer helping organize them, I can tell you it was a very loose and ad-hoc group of dedicated volunteers, whose overall mantra was to try to get every vote to count. Their tactics were defensive and protective. I was impressed by their dedication and idealism as they got ready for election day. And they weren’t doing anything really all that controversial – it was all logistics and grunt work and preparation in case there was a problem.

So, I spent a lot of time in an office, making phone calls to tell the lawyers in PA where they should go on election day. The general Democratic volunteer organization in PA had assigned me to Washington county (south of Pittsburgh) for election day, and I traveled down there on Friday to help prepare and get oriented. My lawyer friend came with me. We arrived at lunchtime, and we walked into a local diner off main street which advertised that it had fed Washington since 1952. That sounded good to me! I walked in, and all conversation stopped and every head at every table turned to stare. I’m not kidding. I tried to smile, and people nodded and went back to eating. The waitress showed us to our table and we ordered our burgers. The tab came to seven dollars for two people! Not bad, for someone coming from L.A. After lunch, we wandered down the Kerry-Edwards headquarters, where we ended up making up the packets for the various election-day volunteers – basic office work like printing up the maps to the polling places in each precinct. It wasn’t glamorous work, but at each step I met great people from all walks of life. From a business school professor, to the local volunteers in Washington county, to a passionate and motivated college student. It was a pretty eclectic mix, but everybody was very enthusiastic and supportive.

On Saturday, I even found time to get out and go door to door. I wasn’t canvassing, but just doing what they call a literature drop -- leaving pro-Kerry information at doors. It was an old neighborhood with brick lined streets and an amazing view across the river to Pittsburgh. At the top of the ridges, there were beautifully constructed new houses, but between the ridges were many burnt-out shells of repossessed or abandoned houses. I didn’t meet too many people out on Saturday, except for a drug dealer who drove by in a low-rider asking me if I wanted to get high (I declined) and one nice lady who took my pamphlet, but told me she’d probably vote for Bush anyway. It’s hard to imagine what George Bush is going to do to help people who live in depressed urban neighborhoods like this – he didn’t seem to accomplish much for this neighborhood in the last four years.

Finally, election day was coming. I was assigned to be a “flusher” in Washington county. Basically, I was supposed to go to the doors of targeted Democratic voters who the campaign team in Washington County had identified as likely Democratic voters and try to encourage them to get out and vote. Sounded like looking for needles in a haystack (I figured most people would be at work), but if I could get out even a handful of voters, that could end up making a difference if the state were really close. And I figured that if there were many volunteers doing the same thing all over, then we’d win the state. Since we were already familiar with Washington, my lawyer friend was assigned to help organize its legal protection team -- sending out lawyers to problem areas at the polls as needed (and we really all hoped they wouldn’t be needed).

Election day. After a fitful night of anticipatory sleep, my alarm went off at 5:30am. My lawyer friend drove us down from Pittsburgh to Washington, PA. It’s nice country – the autumn leaves were still on the trees and we were witness to a beautiful and seemingly auspicious sunrise. We arrived at Kerry-Edwards headquarters in Washington, PA just before the polls opened at 7am. The first call came in for one of the lawyers – a report came in that a polling place down the street had a car papered with Bush posters parked eight feet from the front door. State law says that all signs and electioneering have to be ten feet away. Thinking that arguing over ten feet versus eight feet seemed a little much, I tagged along with a local lawyer to go see for myself. We had a pleasant walk down Main Street. I hadn’t really seen the town on the previous day when I had been stuck in the office. It was obviously struggling to compete with the strip malls just outside town, but there was a pride in the old buildings and a civic feel to all the churches of different denominations built so close together. There’s even a beautiful college campus in town. But no sign of the Bush-mobile!

Returning to the office, I discovered that calls were coming in frantically (it was around 7:30). We already had reports that some voters had been turned away from a polling place because their names were not on the rolls, even though they had registered well before the Oct 4^th deadline. Even worse, others with valid registration cards issued by the county were being forced to fill out provisional ballots because their names were missing from the rolls. The Washington county election office had set up a 1-800 number for election day, for people to call with questions (such as where is my polling place or where am I registered to vote). But the 1-800 line wasn’t working and word came back that the phone system in the elections office was down. A decision was quickly made by the Kerry volunteer lawyers to send over somebody with a cell phone so that we could communicate with the elections office and help the people coming the Democratic HQ with questions. One of the local lawyers volunteered to go, but I suggested that answering the phone and writing down names and addresses did not really require someone to have passed the bar exam. I volunteered in his place.

The Washington county elections office was only a few blocks away, in a modern small office building next to the courthouse. John Smith, another local lawyer, brought me inside and introduced me to the Supervisor of the board of elections, Larry Spahr, and told him what I was planning to do. I was well received, asked to sit in the public waiting area, and told to pass off the names, addressed, birth dates and method of registration to the volunteers from the league of women voters who were supposed to be working the dead phone lines, and then they and the paid staff would look up the names and report back to me. I then would call back to the voters or volunteers on my cell. John Smith wished me luck and ran off to a polling place where two Republican supporters with a barking dog were supposedly scaring voters – an actual Republican attack dog!

Even as I sat down and the first calls came in on my cell, the IT manager of the county was fixing the phones. After about twenty minutes and about five calls on my cell phone, the 1-800 phone lines began to ring and the volunteers jumped to work answering them. I figured my job was just about over. Then, a weird thing started to happen. It was about 8:00 am or so, and the calls started to pour in from all over the county. You see, even after they were fixed, there were only four lines on the 1-800 number. It took the volunteers at least five to seven minutes to complete a request, longer if it was a complicated case (people moving from out of state or people who had registered at the last minute before the deadline but who had not been entered in the computer yet). Pretty soon, the phones were busy all the time, and I was getting a torrent of calls on my cell again, more than I could handle. I called into the Kerry-Edwards office for back-up and was told two more people were coming with their own cell phones.

Then an amazing and frightening thing started to happen. I started to get calls from the judges of election at the different precincts around the county. They couldn’t get through to the board of elections either. They had a direct dial number as well as the 800 number, but both numbers were busy all the time. It was like trying to call in to win one of those radio contests when hundreds of people all try to dial the same number at once. So, when the election judges heard from some of the Democrats that they could reach me inside the elections office, the judges asked for my number and began calling me. To their credit, they asked me who I was and what my party allegiance was (and from what part of the country was area code 213). I tried my best to have the board of elections call them back directly, but I was soon the only reliable way many of the judges could get messages into the office. They were also trying to check on where certain voters were registered – same as we were.

I know what you conspiracy theory fans are thinking. Maybe the Republicans were flooding the lines with fake calls? Was it mischief that made the phones go down in the first place? I can tell you all with some certainty, having spent the day there, that it was purely a case of just too much demand and not enough resources. They had scaled up their operation from the previous election, but not enough. Plus the new provisional ballot rules were leading to confusion at the actual polling places. Somebody should have allocated more resources to the elections office before election day and whoever didn’t should be held accountable for not planning better, but given what they had to work with, the volunteers and workers in the elections office were heroes. Despite the pressure, despite the continued presence and arguments of both Republican lawyers and Democratic lawyers in their office all day, I never saw them lose their cool. They kept working as hard as they could all day. Call after call. Angry citizen after angry citizen. They were trying to do the best they could. But there just weren’t enough phones or computers to handle the load.

Pretty soon, I started getting a new round of calls from the judges of election at each precinct. When they couldn’t get through to the 1-800 line or to me (my cell phone only allows one call waiting at a time, if I get a third call while I’m holding two it goes straight to Voicemail) they had the voters cast provisional ballots. And guess what? Most of the polling places had only been allotted 15 provisional ballots. This decision was made by extrapolating how many people had needed them in the primaries, but without considering first-time voter turn-out in this election and without foreseeing the problem with the 1-800 number. Within an hour, many of the polling places had gone through half of the allotted provisional ballots. The busier the phone lines, the more provisional ballots got cast, but the harder it was to get the message into the office that a polling place was running out. I passed the messages along but there was soon another problem. State law said that a deputy had to carry the provisional ballots to the polling places. But there weren’t enough deputies on duty to handle the demand. So they started deputizing some of the state workers just so that they could carry the ballots. At first the Republicans started to complain when they thought a worker who was a known Democrat was being deputized, but then they realized “Republican-leaning” precincts were running out of provisional ballots too, and that this job just needed to get done.

Meanwhile, there was a steady stream of people coming to the office in person, people who lived nearby but couldn’t get through on the phone. There was the guy asking for an emergency ballot for his sister who was in the hospital. He told me about his time on the professional rodeo circuit. I don’t know who he was voting for, but he sure had some good stories. Wish I’d had more time to talk to him. There were students and mothers and construction workers. Some were angry, most were patient and understanding. And the elections board workers kept trying to look up their names and addresses, but there just weren’t enough computers. I don’t know how many voters gave up at the polling places in frustration or how many cast provisional ballots because they just couldn’t get through. It was very frustrating for me.

Then, my frustration turned to anger. Republican lawyers said that they were going to get a court order to have me and the two Democratic lawyers who had joined me with their own cell phones, banned from the elections office because we had “an unfair pipeline” into the elections commission. There was a Republican operative in from Miami Florida who seemed to be pulling the behind-the-scene strings, but come on! I didn’t have time to ask anybody I spoke to what party they were supporting, and the only party affiliation I was told all day was for a Republican voter, whose name and location I handed over to one of the Republican lawyers when I couldn’t get through to the elections judge on the number she had given me.

To their credit, the local lawyers, both Democrat and Republicans, were able to settle the whole issue without any court orders, although they did appear in front of a judge. The Republicans also argued that a Democratic commissioner had started to help the phone bank volunteers, but then so had a Republican commissioner. They just needed help in there and any state employee was useful. The only effect this had on me was that I was slowed down when I had to explain to the lawyers everything I had seen during the day. And so I was told I could continue. It was refreshing to see how the locals worked together. I saw the local Republicans and Democrats cordially greeting each other and cooperated. Unlike in Los Angeles, it seemed like most of the people in the office knew everybody else (and therefore which party they supported). They would all have to get along tomorrow when the outsiders (like myself) had gone home. So I tried my best to be respectful and was glad the two Democratic lawyers who came to help me were locals. Because they knew the local Republicans, who knew them, and at the end of the day, it really felt like there was a mutual feeling of working together through a problem that needed to be solved.

Eventually, more provisional ballots went out across the county and the head of elections decided that if they ran out again and couldn’t get through, the polling places could create their own provisional ballots by converting regular ballots. As a result, the phone calls stopped coming into my cell phone and the phone bank calmed down to the point where people could actually get through. By 8pm, when the polls closed, things seemed under control. There was a record long line at one of the Republican-leaning polling places, but everybody who was in line at 8pm would get to vote.

I had time to look over my notes from the day. Many of the people who called in were on the registries. Even if they ended up casting a provisional ballot because they couldn’t get through in time, their vote will count in the end. But there were also many voters who had registered with canvassers before the deadline, but whose registration were never sent in. These people are out of luck. My advice to anybody who’s registering to vote for the first time is to mail in your registration yourself. Or at least write down the name of the person taking your registration and what group they claim to be with. I don’t know how organizations like Get Out the Vote protect against dishonest people claiming to be with their organization, but I hope they have some solutions for the next election. In Washington county, were these disenfranchised voters’ forms purposefully destroyed or was it just disorganization by unofficial canvassers? I don’t know, but I spoke to many students at the local colleges who had signed up near the campuses, but whose forms were never submitted. Of the requests I personally took over the phone, 64 voters were actually registered in the county (who were either at the wrong polling place or had registered before the deadline but too late to make the printed rolls), and forty people who said they had registered before the deadline were not found in the system at all. I have no idea of the party affiliation break-down of either of these groups.

I finally left the elections commission at 8:30pm, pretty excited for the night to come, having seen votes get cast and people just figuring out a way to get it done. As I left, the first boxes of ballots were coming in to get counted. I also heard that exit polls in Florida and Ohio were looking very good for John Kerry. I was happy all around – I’d seen people getting to vote, and I’d seen people solving problems in front of me during the day. I was impressed by the dedication and effort, and knew that the elections team in Washington county wanted to see people get to vote. I hope that the underlying logistical problems of not enough phone lines and computers will be solved by the next election. What they need is one phone number for election judges, and another for the general public, and lots more volunteers and computers.

Of course, the rest is history. But I do know this - my experience was life-changing. I only have an inkling of where it will take me. But I feel like I’ve seen hope in Washington, PA. People from both parties who were trying to do the right thing and help their fellow citizens, even when they’d been dealt a pretty bad deck of cards. They didn’t give up. And neither should we, no matter what happens in the next four years. What should we do? On a bipartisan national level, we need to look carefully at how votes are cast. Each state is different, and as I saw, even each county and polling place is operating under different rules and interpretations of the rules.

And the Democratic party? We can start by defining clearly what values our party stands for. The right wing of the Republican party cannot be allowed to claim that they are the only ones who know what mainstream America stands for. Because what I saw in Washington PA were middle of the road people afraid for the future and not sure where to turn. They’re looking for a positive, affirming answer, and someone has to step up and provide it.

And my beard? I’m going to keep shaving. I don’t think shaving my beard helped me convince anybody to change their mind, but I started to watch and listen with a different mind set. I guess for me, taking off the beard was a bit like lowering my guard.

A link to the report about the Washington County election in the local paper, the Observer-Reporter. I’m one of the “observers” mentioned in the article:

http://www.observer-reporter.com/281836470783692.bsp