Election Day

Yesterday I wore my beloved pounamu for luck and with love for all my friends all over the world who were so interested in the outcome of our election and in many many cases are more informed and passionate about our politics than some Americans I know. On the way to volunteer yesterday I was listening to the college radio station and when one of the nineteen-year-old DJs went “Come on UM, let’s do this,” referring to getting out the vote, I got a little teary, I admit.

I had been called by a very urgent volunteer on Sunday night telling me that the South Florida campaign needed people to drive to the polls, so imagine my surprise when I rolled up to the Coral Gables office and presented myself and my car as such, and was told—after I mentioned some safety concerns about going alone to someone random’s house—that actually they didn’t need drivers so much, but could I go to a polling hotspot and linewatch? The idea was to give voters information and to keep an eye out for intimidation or disenfranchisement and to help out the lawyers and so on and so forth.

So imagine my surprise when Nur (a girl I’d met in the campaign office)
and I got there and found more volunteers than actual voters. This would become a theme of the day. When you hear that they really pushed early voting in Florida, they really pushed early voting in Florida..

We hung out for a while talking to the Obama supporters (there were no visible McCain supporters there) and sort of milling around.

We called the campaign office and were like “Uh, this ‘hotspot’ is…totally calm. There’s not even a line,” and they left me on hold while they mapquested a new Hot! Polling! Spot! for us to go to and off we went, eager to pass out stickers and talk to people.

And when we got to the second place—there were no lines, and according to the poll workers there everything was going smoothly. We talked to some of the other volunteers and Nur went over to talk to the woman wearing a McCain/Palin shirt. Nur is Indian British and lives in New York; she can’t vote here obviously she’d come down with two friends to canvass in a swing state and as such she was really interested in talking to everyone about everything. The woman said that she and her whole family had voted for Obama last week but that the McCain/Palin campaign had paid her to advertise for them that day and that she needed the money.

There wasn’t anything to do there so since Nur’s flight was leaving that afternoon we went back to Coral Gables and met up with her other friends and had lunch, after ascertaining that the local Ben and Jerry’s was not, much to our disappointment, doing the free-cones-on-election-day thing. I can only assume that particular shop hates democracy, or something? We had bagel sandwiches instead and stopped in at the campaign office to see what else they needed.

People were still phone banking at 1:00 pm on Election Day.

This was posted in the office stairwell.

It was hard to get a minute to talk to any of the volunteer coordinators, who seemed a little at a loss as to what to do with me—they had volunteers coming in off the street all day—so I ended up saying that if they needed me to go to another polling place later in the day after people got off work when the lines might be longer, to call me. I called Manya and stopped by the Miami City Hall in the Grove, which is where I’d stood about an hour in line to vote ten days ago, just to see how everyone was doing. I didn’t see a line and wondered if they’d been open for early voting only.

As soon as I got home and got settled down with the laptop and a snack, feeling pretty frustrated by my tiny efforts, (“Why back so early?” asked my mom) I got a call from the volunteer coordinator, who asked me to rush over to Miami City Hall and make sure there were no challenges to voters there. “Uh, I was just there like an hour ago and I didn’t even see anyone,” I told her, munching on my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She assured me that it was going to be very crowded as soon as people got off work and that she herself had been challenged there when she early voted; I agreed to go and got back in the car.

Aaaaaaand..no one! When I walked up to the other volunteers there (campaigning for Miami-Dade County issues) they were so excited, going ARE YOU A VOTER? and then so disappointed when I said, uh, no, I’m volunteering for the Obama campaign. I talked to one of the pollworkers, who said that early that morning there’d been a line of about seventy people but since then it’d been really slow. Apparently about half the precinct voted early, which sort of enraged one of the other volunteers when I reported this news back: “I waited four hours on Sunday!” he yelled. “Next time I’m voting on Election Day!” I said goodbye and went home to the blogs.

Mom asked me to let her know when anything important happened so I went and told her when Obama took Ohio and Pennsylvania. Two friends from New Zealand were messaging me at the same time and it was actually David from Wellington, who had better access to technology than I did, that broke the news to me. “Really? Just like that?” I typed. “Really?”

I went and told Mom and she gave me a big hug…”Are you sure?” she kept saying. I just sat on her bed while she checked the news and then we remembered that we actually have a TV in this house, with cable even, that we never use. We missed McCain’s concession speech (which all my Facebook friends said was amazing) and sat on my bed and watched Obama’s speech and said things to each other like “This is really good,” and then gave each other more Election Day hugs. Anna called from Seattle and we talked about how amazing it was—I was still a little dazed—and I read the blogs some more and finally got to bed around three, still marveling that Florida went blue and that the Democrats really did get it together this time.

I don’t think that this president will solve every problem in America and I certainly don’t expect him to be all things to all people—I still have some issues with him and I know it’s going to be a rough couple of years cleaning up the Bush Administration’s political messes. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the anti-marriage initiatives that have gone through here in Florida and in California today and am pretty absolutely heartbroken about those; the Obama victory feels pretty bittersweet in that context.

But still, knowing that so many challenges and problems and outright insanity remains, knowing that my civic responsibility doesn’t stop with the end of the —as I texted D. last night, I am proud of my country today, in a way I haven’t ever really been. It feels good to be able to say that.