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yesthattomI 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).
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.
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.
