Mind you, Susquehanna County didn't go for Barack Obama, and my township sure didn't. I live in Harford Township, and it's pretty well Republican:
The first column is Barack Obama/Joe Biden, the second column is McCain/Palin. But I can't feel too bad about that result -- I suspect Barack for a vote or two from registered Republicans.Coffee Jones, my famous cousin from the greater Boston area, came to town to help with phonebanking and canvassing on the weekend before the election. We were assigned to one of the two wards in Forest City. (Don't remember which one, sorry.)
We must have done our job because both Forest City precincts went for Obama! Whoo-hoo! Coffee even used the Internet to follow the returns from Susquehanna County. Gotta love the Internet...
And now for a sign of the apocalypse, Susquehanna County style. I again volunteered to be the lawyer for the Democratic Party in the county, and I also got to be Barack Obama's lawyer. My official title: "County Counsel for Change," which is silly, but this was a bunch of "inside the Beltway" guys who used acronyms and weird terminology like "flying squads" and "boiler room," so I let them call me what they wanted to.
My primary mandate was to deal with voter protection issues in the county. I made sure the Democratic poll watchers knew who I was and what I was about, and they all had (at some point in time, at least) my cell phone number. No one called me. *sigh* I did have one voter protection issue come up, but provisional ballots had already been cast and there wasn't much I could do.
So, in order to be helpful, I made phone calls (GOTV in our "flying squad" lexicon -- Get Out The Vote) on election day to make sure that likely Obama supporters voted. I had a specific precinct to call -- I won't say which one -- and was nearly through the list when I got a nice fellow. It was his wife I had on my list, but she was napping. Still, he assured me that they had both voted earlier in the day. Then he volunteered the following story.
When his wife gave her name to the election official handling the book -- you know, the book you sign -- the election official said, "Who are you voting for?" This is, of course, wildly illegal. But wait, there's more: When the voter answered (as she surely didn't need to) that she was going to vote for Obama, the election official then said, "You're going to vote for the Antichrist?"
Now, I have no idea if this actually happened, but if it did, it's vote suppression -- or at least attempted vote suppression. Only -- and this has to be classic Susquehanna County -- it wasn't a Republican effort to suppress the vote, it was a loony religious crackpot effort to suppress the vote.
The voter didn't want to lodge a formal complaint, so all I did was tell the election officials at the Courthouse of the anecdotal suggestion that someone at that specific precinct was, uh, taking a possible religious mandate as trumping the civic duty to permit voters to vote in peace. For what it's worth, none of the other voters I spoke with reporting anything like that. So who knows -- could be a one-off.
I finished my election day at the Courthouse watching as they tabulated all the votes. The folks who do this job are very very good at it, and I really didn't have any concerns going in. It was all very smooth, so I mostly listened to NPR's election coverage using headphones (I would share results with the Resolution Board -- a bipartisan group of four citizens who fill in replacement ballots when the machine kicks out a damaged ballot, but I was very discreet). But at some point it occurred to me that I was being treated with a certain amount of deference. I have to say, I don't see myself that way: you know, as someone who has to be treated with deference. And then it hit me: I was the Democratic Party in that room. I was the person prepared to testify if anything went wrong. I was the Official Observer. And there was someone doing this precise job in every other county in Pennsylvania, and presumably every county in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and so forth...
That was my election day. I voted, I called, I observed. And at the end of the day, I cried when I watched President-Elect Obama's speech from Grant Park. For me, the significance is so huge, but in no way greater than the fact that I actually want to keep following the political landscape. I didn't enjoy the election that much, but I suspect it will be fun to watch Barack Obama serve as our 44th president.
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