Arnold's opponents led an unprecedented street operation to get South L.A. voters to the polls
~ By Donnell Alexander ~
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2850&IssueNum=127
n a parking lot at Figueroa and 57th Streets, an open-faced and serious Latina from this 'hood posed the question she hoped would turn South L.A. voters from dormant force to tangible votes against Arnold Schwarzenegger's initiative gambit.
"Can we count on you to vote ‘No' on Prop. 75?" Karla Salazar asked Monday afternoon. But Salazar, who complemented her brimmed black knit cap with a green tee advertising AGENDA (Action for Grassroots Empowerment and Neighborhood Development Alternatives), wasn't reaching out to voters. Instead, surrounded by volunteers wearing logo T-shirts from Service Industry Employee Union, United Health Care Worker, and other labor and community organizations, she was training the people who would touch the voters. And in that act, Salazar would prove a crucial component in a force that pitched a shutout against the governor on Tuesday – an unprecedented effort for a Special Election.
Targeting occasional and new voters, this coalition working out of the campaign headquarters of a grass-roots organization called Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education, or SCOPE, has touched 70,000 residents in precincts from Long Beach to Silver Lake since Labor Day. When Tuesday's overcast skies threatened to keep some from the ballot box, organizers picked the people up at their homes and drove them to their polling places. Masterminded by Anthony Thigpen, the person largely responsible for galvanizing blacks and Latinos behind Antonio Villaraigosa last spring, the simple plan succeeded in transforming voters formerly underplayed by liberal vote-seekers.
"Ain't no trade secrets here," said an organizer called Akili, one of 150 or so people working get-out-the-vote (GOTV) from the South L.A. headquarters. "Differentiating between the propositions was our biggest worry initially. But we're just trying to knock on as many doors as possible."
Upstairs from the SCOPE parking lot where volunteers received training, the wholly unglamorous GOTV groundwork evolved in an atmosphere heavy with acronyms and alive with a surprising sort of glee. As a tinny and undersized boombox spit out Evelyn King's "You Make My Love Come Down," a half-dozen women and a couple of men quietly sang along. As they did this, stacks of paper election door-hangers were stacked, labeled, and bundled.
These door-hangers – election reminders with "VOTE TODAY" on top and a mock -perforated voting cheat-sheet at the bottom – were brought to the scene by the Alliance of Local Leaders for Education, Registration, and Turnout (ALLERT). Above and beyond SCOPE, ALLERT enabled it all: a combination of volunteers (mostly union members, but also at least two New Orleans evacuees) and paid staff who enacted the strategy of igniting would-be voters. In SCOPE's meeting room, hallways, auditorium, and even on the second-floor outdoor deck, they sat amid box lunches, water bottles, and Starbuck's cups and performed the mundane duty of prepping those paper prompts for street distribution. As the special election had compressed the number of polling sites in half, these reminders had a newly complex function.
"The most important thing is that people can't go to the usual polling place," said organizer Elsa Barbosa. "We have to remind people to vote and tell them where to go. You go door-to-door and look people in the eye. On the phone, it's not as intimate."
This is not to suggest that the strengths of phone outreach were ignored. In mid-September a phone bank was put in place, allowing volunteers from community organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to contact registered voters – all of whom were culled from the county registrar's rolls – as often as once a week. The United Teachers L.A. (UTLA) and California Teachers Alliance phone outreach coordinators also helped put together the dial-a-ride component, a service based out of the building that houses the County Federation of Labor.
ALLERT's reach extended far beyond this southern section of Los Angeles. Coalition clergy organizer Tonette Hayes explained that contacts with 1,300 ministers and bishops around the state helped shape "Say ‘No' Sundays," in ´´11 which parishioners would, among other gestures, ask nurses, teachers, and other union members to stand, as a symbol of who would be affected if the governor's agenda were enacted. Getting church officials onboard took less genius than effort, Hayes said.
"When people don't have jobs, they can't tithe," Hayes said. Asked if she worried that Republicans might in time co-opt this strategy, she said, "They can't."
By Tuesday the beachhead of election energy was so powerful that a middle-aged woman on the 37 bus traveling toward downtown on West Adams was heard to yell at the driver, "Let me off at the next stop! I gotta go vote!"
"Southern Californians are not always comfortable with inclement weather," Akili opined in the hours before polls opened. "So we've got to be more focused."
A part of that focus was aimed at ferrying voters without transportation throughout Tuesday. Just after 3 p.m., as the sky reached the apex of its daytime darkness, a call came in from the County Fed telephone center and was routed to SCOPE and, eventually, to Kyle Stewart, volunteer with a law practice on the west side. A Pico-Union woman needed a lift to her polling place.
In the past, Stewart had worked as a legal observer in polling places, as well as on "renegade, grass-roots" GOTV efforts. ("Did you vote?" she recalled repeatedly screaming to pedestrian stragglers in Milwaukee in November of 2004.) This time, Stewart expected less randomness.
"Anthony Thigpen is a pro, and it's not gonna be a shabby operation," said Stewart. She had given her first ride at 8:30 a.m. Paperwork with the pick-up's name, address, and polling place lay on her lap. The radio-safe version of "Fuck Wit Dre Day" banged on KDAY as she steered a borrowed Toyota 4x4 onto the northbound 110. Stewart observed, "This is much more organized and efficient."
It was only a few blocks from the caller's modest four-plex on a working-class street off Pico. With the threatening weather, though, the distance very likely would have not been surmountable without the ride. And as Stewart, 36, opened the back of the 4x4, the caller lifted her mother from her wheelchair and into its passenger-side front seat. She broke down the wheelchair and handed it to Stewart. Then she thanked the volunteer and rode off with her mother to vote. That's the attraction of this scrum we call the democratic process: Every vote counts the same.
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