My experience was very dull. I was assigned to a precinct in uber-Republican Hilliard. After helping out a bit with getting an early morning line straightened out and advising the poll workers about the law, I settled down to a largely tedious day with a trickle of voters, explaining to the ones that came in that I was a voting rights attorney not affiliated with the Board of Elections, and they could refer any questions or difficulties they had to me or to the inside guy. I had no encounters with bar codes and didn't know they were an issue.
I voted early in Ill., for BHO, the Dem for State's Attorney, since I care about that, against unqualified judges, and otherwise straight Green.
I spent a lot of the day reading a Scott Turow novel (Laws of our Fathers, not bad, though rather a grim picture of 60's radicalism, there's a Bill Ayers character in the book who comes off very badly). I tried to get reassigned but it was pretty much the same everywhere, and when I finally did get reassigned, I was no more needed at the new place that I was useful at the old. We carried Franklin County my an easy margin.
--- On Sun, 11/9/08, WD <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: WD <mister.wd at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] did anyone actually get involved with the obama campaign?
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, November 9, 2008, 5:22 PM
> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 3:38 PM, shag carpet bomb
> <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, I was hoping folks who actually got
> involved in the
> > campaign could tell me a little more about what they
> observed. For instance,
> > did anyone actually participate in how the campaign
> used barcodes to track
> > potential voters. Stuff like that -- or not like that
> also -- would be
> > interesting.
>
> My wife volunteered as an attorney poll observer in eastern
> N.C. She
> found the whole operation incredibly disorganized: she had
> to call all
> sorts of people over the course of several days just to get
> trained
> and she received contradictory assignments and so forth.
> I've heard
> other attorneys had similar problems.
>
> The way the barcode thing worked in N.C. is that both Reps
> and Dems
> are entitled to have an observer who actually sits in the
> polling
> place and checks off the names of people who came in to
> vote. The
> campaigns then had "runners" who were allowed to
> walk into the polling
> place (I think the limit was three times during the day) to
> retrieve
> the lists of people who had voted so the campaign could
> target GOTV
> efforts at people who hadn't yet voted. Since I voted
> early, I never
> got called, but everyone I know who waited until election
> day says
> they got called several times Tuesday.
>
> -WD
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