Voter Registration Drive (day 1) (a big realization at the end)

[yesthattom]

I walked the streets of Newark on Saturday looking for people that wanted to be registered to vote. This was my first actual volunteering for Obama this year (my bloviating on LJ doesn’t count as actual campaign work, eh?)

The MyBO social networking web site (my.barackobama.com) has a function that lets people announce pro-Obama events that they are doing (with or without connection to the official campaign). When I log in, I see the events that are near my zip code, 07003. I wanted to spend at least SOME time this weekend volunteering now that the DNC is over. More as we get closer to Election Day.

About 8 of us met at the designated time. An energetic young women named Caitlin was there with clipboards and voter registration forms, aprons with Obama logo on them, etc. I asked what office she’s working out of and she explained that she just does this every weekend (and more); it’s her clipboards, her stash of voter reg forms, pens, etc. She does turn them into the local Dem office for processing rather than mailing them in (i.e. they collect the names off the forms before mailing them; a standard practice. Those people get phone calls, etc. on Election day encouraging them to go to vote). However, she wasn’t part of any organized effort, she just does this because it’s her way of making things happen. She does this 2-3 times a week.

The street we were walking was Market St in Newark. Newark is a very poor city, mostly minorities and working poor. The street was crowded... nearly overflowing. Market Street is a big shopping district, with as much foot traffic there for the stores as to see the many street vendors selling ice cream, bootleg DVDs, New Ports, Bibles, and other stuff. There were a lot of homeless people. A few pimps and dealers. A lot of women out doing their weekly shopping, and kids shopping for school clothes. I had tried to dress relatively “street”, which for a nerdy white guy is pretty difficult. What I’m trying to say is... I didn’t blend. (Google Street View of the area. (click on the little yellow man).

Market St., Newark, NJ -- the day I was there it was much more crowded

However, wearing an Obama apron and a baseball cap seemed to give plenty of people reason to wave or say “hi”.

It was hot. The sun was bright.

In 2 hours I signed up 7 people to vote. Half of those were change-of-address. In fact, I found I got more attention when I’d call out “Register to vote... or change of address!” than when I just was calling out “Register to vote!”. One guy approached me and said that he had sent in a voter registration form but got back a letter saying that there was a problem with it. He filled out one of my forms and I checked it over. The NJ forms are about twice as long as the NY forms that I have... I wonder if they’re just too complicated.

One girl dragged her boyfriend over to me. His buddy followed them both. She was registered, but wanted him to be registered too. As he filled out the form he looked over to his buddy standing with him and said, “You got 2 more months of parole then you can register too.” He wasn’t kidding. This is life in Newark.

When he was done I looked to her and said, “You make sure he gets to the polls early, right? The lines are gonna be long.” She assured me she would drag “his sorry ass” out of bed.

One young African-American man passed me and said, “Oh, I’m registered! but I ain’t voting for no Obama!”. I wanted to start a dialog with him about why. Maybe I could change his mind. I had a hunch that he was Christian and didn’t believe that Obama was too. However, he was running when he yelled what he did, and didn’t stop until he was out of sight.

At one point I was approached by a black homeless man with tall hair and a crazy look on his face. I had just finished registering an older African-American woman, thanked her, turned, and called out my usual, “Register to vote, here!”. The homeless man paused, turned around, and said, “You know what’s wrong with this? I’ll tell you!” I froze, not sure what to expect. The woman that had just registered was also frozen. “The problem is... that... YOU setting him up to be president but then YOU is gonna kill him!”

The homeless man turned away and kept walking. The woman that had just registered saw how shocked I was and said, “That’s just ignorant.”

“Yeah.” I agreed. “Sadly, there’s a lot of that.” It wasn’t the perfect thing to say, but I was pretty shocked by the idea that someone would blame all white people for anything bad that might happen to Obama.

Did I mention I was stunned by this? Let me tell you how stunned. You know how in movies when something shocking happens they turn off all the background noise? The world literally went silent for what felt like an eternity. As I pondered my response, as the woman and I looked at each other, as the whole aftermath happened... silence.

Two hours after it all began we met back at the starting place and Caitlin collected her clipboards, Obama aprons, pens, etc. Someone was going to the Jersey Gardens mall to join the effort there to register people and I offered him a ride so he didn’t have to take the bus.

I hung out at Jersey Gardens for a while. They seemed to be pretty organized and I was feeling tired so I left shortly after.

Postscript:

I’ve done a lot of voter registration over the years but this was my first time doing it during this election cycle. It was also the first time doing it in a place like Newark where the poverty was so apparent. It felt weird to be walking around a crowded street being one of the few white people there and certainly the only person in my income bracket. I felt out of place. I felt like I was walking through an open air market in a third-world country trying to sell something nobody wanted.

But what really struck me was the inefficiency of it all. Why was I having to “sell” the concept of being registered to vote? Shouldn’t we just all be registered? If voting is such a good and patriotic thing, registration be opt-out instead of opt-in? We all now have social security numbers, why not make registration automatic?

6 registrations in 2 hours. Three per hour. One every 20 minutes. That’s just ludicrous.

When something is this inefficient, there are some obvious ways to deal with it. One is to use massive amounts of free labor. This is the current technique... find tons and tons and tons of volunteers to walk every street trying to get people registered. The other way is to come up with an entirely different way to gather registrations: Could the Democrats afford to send a voter reg. form to every person in New Jersey by mail? It would be a simple matter of buying a few massive marketing databases, removing the known registered voters, removing people that are obviously Republicans (as determined by various modern marketing database techniques), and paying a bulk-mail service to send out forms to all these people.

Alternatively, shouldn’t this be the job of the government? Why not set things up so that after the IRS processes your taxes, the DMV renews your license, or the state department issues a passport, they send a note to the local voter registration clerk with an update? If everything was electronic, it would be a simple XML-RPC call over the internet to say, “Here is a person who, if not already registered, should be registered. We’ve verified they are a resident and a citizen.” Anyone newly registered would be mailed a confirmation/correction form. I fear that too many of these systems involve paper and people manually re-entering data from one place to another. There is no reason for that any more. Each state could have a single database with a single interface for the IRS, DMV and State Dept to transmit updates to.

Or why isn’t there 1 day a year that postal carriers leave a voter registration form in every mailbox they deliver to? On the back could be instructions on how to get more forms, how to register online, etc. That requires zero databases, just give them enough forms for all the homes they visit.

It should be required by law that that every post office, DMV, and government building has a little dispenser that includes voter registration forms and information.

But really... why isn’t voting compulsory like in Australia? In Australia you are registered to vote if you are a citizen. You have to vote, or at least stand in the voting booth and press “none of the above”. Don’t vote? Pay a fine.

The only politicians that are afraid of high voter turn-out are the kinds of politicians that we don’t want to have in this country. I’ve heard claims that Dems are favored during higher turn-out elections but I’ve also heard the opposite. I think it just isn’t true either way.

Anyhow... there are a million reasons politicians will come up with to prevent such a system but there is one reason that we should do it: it’s the right thing to do.

In the meanwhile, I’ll be back on the street next week too. You should too.

Comments

[lovingboth]

In the UK, it is the duty of the householder to make sure everyone is registered. As citizens of other European Union countries get to vote here in elections to the European Parliament, you don't have to be a British citizen to be on it. There is none of the 'if you've been convicted of blah, you don't get to be registered' crap. The electoral roll is used heavily for credit checks - if you're not on it, you will have problems getting credit - and is the basis for jury service amongst other things.

The perceived problem with making voting compulsory is that 'none of the above' parties would benefit disproportionally and they tend to be on the extremes.

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

Most jury duty selection in the US is done based on the voter registration list.

I have a clever idea! Why don't we just have to present our "Papers", Please!National Citizenship ID to vote? Easy enough to tie that all together into a nice Big Brother SchemeNational Voting Database... I'll bet you could even statisticly predict who voted how with continuous update voting machines!

[ayse.livejournal.com]

Really? Everywhere I've lived it's done with driver registration records. I know because I use a different name variant for voting and driving.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Nope, it's done with voter registration records in the US (mostly). And I know a couple of people who have not registered to vote because they don't want to be called for jury duty.... which is just dumb IMHO...

[ayse.livejournal.com]

I just find that hard to believe, given that it's not true in any state I've lived in. Granted, that's only three states, but one of them is the most populous state in the union.

Maybe in the South they do it to keep black people off juries. I would not be surprised at that.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Data point: I got a summons for Jury Duty in NJ three years after I traded my old driver's license in for one in MA, because apparently MA had never updated NJ and my NJ driver's license was expiring.

All while I was registered to vote in MA.

I believe it's done via both...and that IRS tax filings are sometimes used.

More to yesthattom's point, the Mass RMV has a checkbox when you get/renew your driver's license that asks if you want to register to vote....which I think is great, because they give you a printed slip that's your receipt, and then a few weeks later you get a confirmation in the mail.

So I think that yesthattom's point about DMV's having voter registration info is valid. I also believe that most post offices and libraries have the forms, certainly near election time they do.

I don't think compulsory voting is likely to happen unless voting through the mail is more trusted/faster (right now they wait until after election day to process the mail-in votes) *and* it's an actual goddamn holiday where NOBODY works.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

New Jersey switched from voters only to a combination of voters and drivers about 15 years ago. That was to reduce the number who wouldn't register to avoid jury duty.

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

In Canada, there is a check box on your income tax return to permit CRA to forward the required information to Elections Canada, the government body that maintains voter lists. When there is an election at any level of government, it is also possible to register at the poll on election day or at a location in the neighbourhood in the few weeks leading up to the election.

[etler.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if compulsory voting is a good thing. I see voting as a right, not a duty. I can exercise my rights if I choose to or not. I hate to see people not vote, but I think forcing them to is even worse. Plus, what do you do, for instance, about people who for religious reasons refuse to vote? I just don't see compulsory voting as being constitutional in the US. I don't even know if it's something that could be enforced on a nationwide level since there's pretty much no such thing as a federal election (outside of DC). It would likely be up to the states, and I still don't think it'd be constitutional.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

You're describing part of why I'm glad I spent some time living in the city and riding the bus (really, even though SF is YuppieDisney). It's too easy to live in a little bubble and not be aware of other people's experience. I have a pretty good grasp on white rural poverty since I grew up near it, but poverty + race and poverty + urban landscape are a whole different thing.

One thing that did bug me when I moved here is the lag time between registration and being eligible to vote (actually I missed the recall election that gave us Arnold because of this). In WI I remember getting to bring ID and prove of residence to the polls...maybe it was a conditional ballot, but it didn't seem to be straight-into-the-trash status as conditional ballots appear to be here.

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

I don't get a vote, obv, so my best plan so far is to convince a McCain supporter not to :-P (They're not terribly easy to find, though).

[jayeye.livejournal.com]

It doesn't matter whether they vote or not; the votes have already been counted and tallied in Diebold's data center.

Has the Big-O campaign done *anything* to challenge the use of poorly tested, potentially compromised DER voting machines? I haven't seen anything in the various crypto/security lists I'm on.

[ayse.livejournal.com]

It should be required by law that that every post office, DMV, and government building has a little dispenser that includes voter registration forms and information.

I don't know if it's required by law or not, but I've been spending a lot of time in court buildings lately, and all of them have voter registration forms in a little display, as does the DMV, as do all my county's buses, as does practically every grocery store, many banks, and all the post offices and libraries I visit. Is it much less obvious how to register to vote in Jersey? Weird.

But as for why so few people registered with you: my hunch would be that nobody trusts you to actually hand in the forms. It's a classic way of tricking would-be voters: say you're signing them up to vote and then never send the forms in. They show up on election day, and they can't vote. Instant disenfranchisement.

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

I didn't think of that. Does that really happen? Wow, such evilness that exists.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is why when I registered people to vote (only the once, so it's not like I'm an old hand here) we were told to always offer to let them to take the form and mail it themselves if they preferred. Not that suburban San Mateo County is exactly awash with this kind of fraud.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

When I was in High School, someone from the League of Women Voters came into our English class and we had a conversation about Civics. At the end he distributed SASE voter registration forms. If you weren't yet 18, you could either return it when you were or you could mail it in and it would be held and filed when you turned 18 (I can't remember who held them.....)

A few weeks after my 18th birthday, my green and white voter registration card came in the mail. This was a very efficient way of doing things.

I know I've seen voter registration cards at the post office in Metuchen, where I used to live. I'd also seen them in the lobby of the bank.

One of the big drawbacks might be that between the phone and the Internet, younger voters rarely go to of places like the MCV or post office anymore. I would like to see corporations that pay lip service to being good citizens have kiosks in their stores where people can register to vote (think Walmart, McDonalds, Target or Friday's.)

As much as I value an active electorate, I bristle at the thought fining people (or making it compulsory) in any way for people to vote. I feel this way for a couple of reasons.

1. Who the heck would enforce this? Are we creating more government or passing monitoring and enforcement off to some already overworked civil servants?

2. There are people, like my mother the Jehovah's Witness for example, who view voting and participating in politics as a violation of their religion. I am very *uncomfortable* with fining people who are exercising their freedom of religion. Ditto for people who are engaging on civil protest. My ex is an advocate for 3rd parties and once or twice he participated in an "abstain from the vote" action.

3. I think I'd rather have 50% of the people, most of whom have at least a nominal idea of who is voting and some of the issues at stake, vote than have 98% of the electorate voting when half of them don't even give a tinker's damn.

A couple of other thoughts...

I'm going to bet if you look at street marketing and cold calling statistics, a registration every 20 minutes is not bad considering you weren't giving away free stuff.

I wonder how many of those folks were already registered? I wonder how many just didn't want to give out their name and address to someone who said they were working for Barak Obama either because they weren't sure whether they could trust that the person *really was* with Obama's campaign or they are afraid of political junk mail? That could account a percentage of the people who passed you by.

Voting is a hard sell because we don't make it convenient and people are feeling less and less invested in the political infrastructure.

It wasn’t the perfect thing to say, but I was pretty shocked by the idea that someone would blame all white people for anything bad that might happen to Obama.

What is it about that statement that affected you so deeply? I'm kind of surprised that you're surprised by this attitude. "Black People" (because we're just a homogeneous group that all think and act alike), have been blamed as a group for all sorts of stupid stuff for a long time now. It's not the most enlightened attitude for anyone of any race to take, but I'm going to bet it's a lot more prevalent than you or I realize.

Thank you for being enough of a true believe to be out there.

[geeksdoitbetter.livejournal.com]

~big hugs~

i'm sorry you were a victim of racism

~more hugs~

[fes42.livejournal.com]

Hi there, I'm a friend of awfief and read your public posts here and there. I have one question about your work today.

t's legal to register someone to vote while carrying/wearing a candidate's name? That really can't be right either can it?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

It's absolutely legal.

Electioneering (to work actively for a candidate or political party) is permitted while canvassing and registering people to vote. It is not legal within 100 ft (different in different states) of a polling booth on election day.

[fes42.livejournal.com]

I knew about the election day laws, part of me thought it went to registering people as well. My bad.

I live in MA, we have a motor voter bill. You move here and change your license and viola on THE SAME FORM you can be registered as well. Really, really easy. Granted not all use the RMV, but many if not most do.

I guess my thinking is that if we want more people to register or be registered the system like you said has to change. But I think if it does, the idea of political parties working to register voters has to go out the window too. While you and I know, registering a voter while wearing an Obama Button does not require the new voter to vote for him, but I don't know if every new voter knows that. I think that needs to be clearer.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and that may be why many folks didn't register to vote. Given fes42's particular knowledge of Newark, I'd like to hear more about her opinion of this...

I mean, obviously out of place "not my people" guy wearing an Obama apron, trying to get me to register to vote, I'd think that if I checked off "Republican" (many poor people vote republican), he'd hide my form.

"Motor voter bill" -- I like the name of that! :) and I mentioned that in my comment before reading that, though I didn't call it that. I think it's very speedy and efficient too, and it's the only way Tony has managed to registered to vote. :)

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

Yep. It's legal. You have to register anyone who wants to register, regardless of party or affiliation, but you can express your opinion about a candidate while registering people. Political Speech is heavily protected under the first amendment. Of course, harassment is not allowed.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't have to register anyone if I don't want... from a legal perspective. I just can't stop someone from registering or trick them into thinking they are registered when they aren't. On the other hand, the table set up at the mall did have an agreement with the mall management that they could only have the table if they register anyone... which is a totally fair thing to do.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

Interesting. What's the distinction between not registering someone you don't want to, and "stopping someone from registering"?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

"stopping someone from registering" would include stuff such as threats and violence, government employees throwing out registration forms, etc.

[jenn-girl.livejournal.com]

In PA I check off a box when I get my driver's license saying yes or no if I want to register to vote and what party I want to register. When I changed my address, I got a letter from the old county that they were notifying my new county of my address change. It all went through automatically. It was much easier than I have heard from other people.