GOTV

I went to the polls at 10:00 this morning. Had about a half hour wait to cast my ballot. I've had longer waits, but not at that time of day. From there, I went directly to the Kerry volunteer staging point for Nashua, and within minutes I was dispatched to drive a huge stack of reports from pollwatchers and canvassers to the downtown campaign headquarters. I got back just in time to get assigned a partner and get instructions for the "Pull Team", whose job was to wait for all those reports to be crunched with the master lists of registered voters, and then be ready to go door-to-door to Get Out The Vote. I drove my partner and her 12 year old daugher to the district that we were told we would be assigned so we could familiarize ourselves with the streets. I've lived here for 21 years, but there are still a lot of side streets in town that I've never driven on, but there are about fifty fewer of those as tonight!

We returned from our reconaissance to find out that the reports were going to take a lot longer than had been expected to crunch, due (or so we were told) to the incredibly large turnout at the polls in the morning, so we had some waiting to do. I made myself useful while waiting by driving bottles of water and snacks to some of the visibility teams, and also by giving driving directions to some of the non-local volunteers for their assigned areas.

Just before the Pull Team address lists arrived, we got pep-talk from the volunteer coordinator. He reviewed numbers from 2000, when Bush took New Hampshire by a slim margin, and had our four electoral votes gone to Gore instead the election result would have been different. He broke the margin down by precinct, getting to the point: three additional Gore votes per precinct state-wide would have changed the election result. This year it's even closer in the pre-election polls in New Hampshire than it was in 2000, so even one additional vote per precinct could easily be the margin of victory.

My Pull Team partner and brought in at least two votes for Kerry. Almost everybody on our list was either not home, or told us that they had already voted. The two voters that we did pull in were actually not on our list. Chance encounters in the neighborhood with a young woman who saw us knocking on doors and asked where she had to go in order to vote, and with an 18 year old who was not on our list but answered the door when we were looking for his mother, and who didn't know that he could register right at the polls and then immediately vote. While we were continuing to work the neighborhood, we saw them both head off to the polls.