Canvassing
My first day canvassing was frustrating, as I did not talk with anyone who was actually on my list. The closest I got was a guy who first said, "We don't want any" and followed it with "He's not here now", which at least meant the person existed.
And just earlier today I was thinking "Wow, I'm doing well, no clothing's disappeared" and now I've lost a sock doing laundry.
One of the problems with trying to write like this is maintaining a coherent narrative, because my mind doesn't really work like that at all, and when I try to force it into doing that all I manage to remember are the most obvious "important" parts, which tends to make it all a little dull, I fear.
But, returning to LV, I did manage to talk to a few people that day, but they were all from Joey's list (he was my partner that day) because he'd been given too many. We spent the entire morning in one apartment/condo complex, I've got some pictures of it, and the afternoon we spent discovering that all the addresses we had NOT in that place were in hotels (and so were no longer valid) or didn't exist. We ended the day helping Ankit and Mo chase down the last few addresses they had in a sprawling suburban develepment area.
The next day Dan and I went around to a very similar area, although, since the previous night was Halloween, the schedule had everyone starting at noon instead of 8. So that went pretty well, we didn't get quite as much done because we were walking a whole neighborhood, but it was fun, and there were more people. At the end I got separated from Dan, who was the one of us with a cell phone (which everyone in California has, they actually get good service out here, more on this later), so I sat out in front of a house with a Kerry/Edwards sign in the yard right by where we'd been dropped off, waiting for him or our van to show up. Then the man who lived in the house came out with the garbage, and I explained why I was sitting there and he let me in to use the bathroom (I had been holding it long enough to seriously contemplate watering his cacti) and call Dan. It was nice to talk with him for a little while, he was married, two daughters and a couple dogs, I think, and he was all for Kerry, glad we were getting people to vote, said he hadn't been this angry since the Vietnam war. It was kind of a surprise too, because his appearance and his house suggested that his sign could just as well have been Bush/Cheney, as so many others in the neighborhood were.
Later in the evening Dan and I went to a new apartment complex (our team was assigned a new chunk of the city each day) and, since all the addresses were in my packet, split it up and finished off our night's work.
That was the first and only day Team MacGuyver (sp?) was split up, discounting MacGuyver itself. MacGuyver was the name we gave to our rental van when we first got in and it was added to the pool, and we never saw it again until we left. Apparently over that weekend all the mini-vans in Vegas were rented. And ours was from SFO. Anyway, that day Charice got paired with a different group to drive a different van. We made sure to get there early enough to be paired up with her the next day, Nov. 2.
Have I explained what we were doing yet? Basically everyone got out there however they could, formed groups of six + a driver each morning and were assigned three contiguous sections of the city to canvass, two people, odd side and even side, although that didn't usually work out very well, per section. We didn't get split up because we tried not to, not because the system was set up to keep people together. Which had its pluses and minuses. Team MacGuyver is an awesome group of people and a lot of fun to be with, but it would have been nice to meet more other people too. Once we got our packets with maps and lists and everything, we drove over there, split up, and started knocking on doors and reminding people to vote (these were all people who'd been identified as likely Kerry/Democratic voters). We marked down if they intended to vote, had voted, bad address, not home, or weren't for Kerry. At the end of the day we turned our packets in and let the organizers (ACT, America Coming Together) deal with it.
On voting day, reunited, we did pretty much the same thing, in a new area again, but this time we were also offering people rides to the polls if they needed them. Andrew and I teamed up that day and spent most of our time in apartments in a run down part of town. During the morning it was pretty bad. We split up this two block long, dingy gray ugly edifice, hall after dirty halls of beat up apartments. Not only was the numbering hard to figure out (I spent the first half-hour knocking on doors a half block down from the section of the building I was looking for), but the management was not at all happy to have us there. I had just finished knocking on all my doors when someone came up and told me to leave, and to avoid the nearest gate because I didn't want to run into the manager. Which meant I had to walk the two blocks to the other end of the parking lot and climb over the closed gate there. And that last half-block was all boarded up...it was a sketchy place. Andrew apparently got caught several times before he reached all the addresses, changing his shirt and/or hat each time before returning. From what he said, the security guard, whom I had successfully avoided, was pretty cool about the whole thing, but had to ask him to leave because the manager was temperamental.
We didn't get as much accomplished that day as before. Our locations were fairly well spread out, and what with the cat and mouse we got separated and I, sans cell phone, wasn't sure where to go. At one point, after we did re-meet, he asked me to just wait while he finished what he'd been working on so we didn't get split up again. We then went through another, relatively nicer, apartment complex down the street aways, split it up and got done fairly quickly.
Charice picked us up and we discussed what to do next (we'd finished pretty much all of what was on our list) and then had lunch in a park. ACT gave us lunches that day and Sunday, but since we'd gotten started so late Monday, we'd had to fend for ourselves. While eating lunch we listened to NPR, I forget which program, maybe Talk of the Nation, but at one point there was a discussion about a web poll of people outside the US on who they would vote for. They didn't actually say what percent Bush got, but it 77% for Kerry and 14% for Nader. Although I think it was something like 70% for Bush among Iraqis with internet access. Not that any of that made much difference.
After lunch we helped Dan and Ankit, who's area was very spread out, and in the evening returned to the second apartment complex we'd been to, to find anyone we'd missed during the day. And we did find a few people. Andrew found someone who needed a ride, so Charice came by, picked her up. I had knocked on the door of Jesus Alvarez, that was the name on the sheet, who wasn't home, but the person I took to be his wife was, as were children. The 8-year-old daughter, the oldest acted as translator, her English was excellent, unaccented, and they decided to call up someone's sister and get a ride to the polling place. It was funny, I told the girl where the polls were and she cocked her hip and all sassy "Isn't that a school?", like I must be crazy. I assured her it was.
While Andrew and I were waiting for Charice to get back, having completed our rounds, we were sitting by the sidewalk and some people walked by. I forget what started it, I think Andrew was encouraging them all to vote. He's vocal like that. And this guy, untucked checkered shirt, kind of unshaven, short straw-colored hair, I think missing a tooth starts talking back and girlfriend pushing a shopping cart, saying his vote's not worth anything, or something like that. But it became a real conversation about the tradeoffs between protecting domestic workers and allowing free markets to force competition and a number of issues on which he was surprisingly well informed. Turns out he was a tech worker in California up until the dot.com bubble burst and/or outsourcing kicked in. Encouraging.
Then Charice came back and we were just kind of sitting there, about to go, when I decided that I should check on that family and see if they needed a ride. So I went, and they still hadn't left. At first when I said I could give her a ride she was reluctant, because she didn't have anywhere to leave the kids. But I said they could come with, and she was excited and they all got their coats on and bundled out to the van. And then we were talking there and I finally realized that her name, which I'd thought was Imelda, was Jesusa Imelda and that it was a typo on the sheet. Probably. Although she seemed to old with too many young kids to be a single mom... In any case, it was a great way to finish the night. She was the last person to that station, just made it in, although she ended up having to fill out a provisional ballot, I don't think she'd registered at her current address. Even so, it felt really good. And that first picture of Charice's is all of us.
After we dropped them off, we went back to the ACT staging ground, turned in our info, and reclaimed MacGuyver. And from there we went to the Tropicana, for the Driving Votes party. Which eventually got broken up for noise complaints, so everyone went to another room to hang out and watch the election results, which also eventually got broken up for noise complaints. Some of Ankit's pictures are about that, he stuck around with security longer than I did.
On Wednesday Joey and Dan flew out early morning, and before leaving we dropped Andrew (and Meera, who'd coordinated our trip out) off at the airport. Which left me, Charice, Ankit, and Mo for the trip back to San Fran. It was a good drive. A little past the state line I was having trouble keeping my eyes on the road and so pulled off at this middle of nowhere exit with this one little store off to the right. We went in, went to the bathroom, got some snacks and drinks... It was a really cool place, one guy built saddles and other tack, real nice work (from what little I know), and the other guy did this thing where he'd take prints and then metallicize them so they were shiny. I'm not really sure how to describe it or what it's called, but it was cool. If you're ever driving along that stretch of I-15, I recommend checking that place, I think it was a two word name and there's nothing visible except that store, out.
Mo told a good story about his family pressuring him to get married. He wants to turn it into a segment on This American Life, so I won't repeat it. He tells it better anyway.
I like the southeastern California, it's so empty, simple, but a lot of texture to the earth, simple colors, yet a lot going on with them. It seemed like it might be a nice place to be a hermit for a while.
Once we hit central CA it started to rain, hard. When it began to clear up, the combination of dense, low clouds and hills to the west made it appear as if the sky was a uniform glowing yellow, something I don't think I've ever seen before. When there started to be some gaps for blue and sun, it was that strange shade of blue that somehow reminds me of photos of Switzerland taken in the late '70s to early '80s. There was an afternoon like that once at Bowdoin early this spring, with melting snow gently dripping from the pine trees.
We weren't sure where to get off to let Mo and Ankit off at the nearest BART station, and got a little lost. But I think they made it back. Charice and I were going to go to the airport, but she was anxious to get home and it would only take one of us to drop the car off anyway. So I let her off at her apartment, and took the van to the Enterprise section of the rental car lot. What with all the rain and driving all that remained of the MacGuyver sign was a few scraps of tape. Oh well. I got on the wrong airport train and had to turn around to get to the BART station there. Got on the bus from 16th and Mission and walked the last few blocks. Stayed up for a while longer and then went to bed. Not the happiest of days.
And just earlier today I was thinking "Wow, I'm doing well, no clothing's disappeared" and now I've lost a sock doing laundry.
One of the problems with trying to write like this is maintaining a coherent narrative, because my mind doesn't really work like that at all, and when I try to force it into doing that all I manage to remember are the most obvious "important" parts, which tends to make it all a little dull, I fear.
But, returning to LV, I did manage to talk to a few people that day, but they were all from Joey's list (he was my partner that day) because he'd been given too many. We spent the entire morning in one apartment/condo complex, I've got some pictures of it, and the afternoon we spent discovering that all the addresses we had NOT in that place were in hotels (and so were no longer valid) or didn't exist. We ended the day helping Ankit and Mo chase down the last few addresses they had in a sprawling suburban develepment area.
The next day Dan and I went around to a very similar area, although, since the previous night was Halloween, the schedule had everyone starting at noon instead of 8. So that went pretty well, we didn't get quite as much done because we were walking a whole neighborhood, but it was fun, and there were more people. At the end I got separated from Dan, who was the one of us with a cell phone (which everyone in California has, they actually get good service out here, more on this later), so I sat out in front of a house with a Kerry/Edwards sign in the yard right by where we'd been dropped off, waiting for him or our van to show up. Then the man who lived in the house came out with the garbage, and I explained why I was sitting there and he let me in to use the bathroom (I had been holding it long enough to seriously contemplate watering his cacti) and call Dan. It was nice to talk with him for a little while, he was married, two daughters and a couple dogs, I think, and he was all for Kerry, glad we were getting people to vote, said he hadn't been this angry since the Vietnam war. It was kind of a surprise too, because his appearance and his house suggested that his sign could just as well have been Bush/Cheney, as so many others in the neighborhood were.
Later in the evening Dan and I went to a new apartment complex (our team was assigned a new chunk of the city each day) and, since all the addresses were in my packet, split it up and finished off our night's work.
That was the first and only day Team MacGuyver (sp?) was split up, discounting MacGuyver itself. MacGuyver was the name we gave to our rental van when we first got in and it was added to the pool, and we never saw it again until we left. Apparently over that weekend all the mini-vans in Vegas were rented. And ours was from SFO. Anyway, that day Charice got paired with a different group to drive a different van. We made sure to get there early enough to be paired up with her the next day, Nov. 2.
Have I explained what we were doing yet? Basically everyone got out there however they could, formed groups of six + a driver each morning and were assigned three contiguous sections of the city to canvass, two people, odd side and even side, although that didn't usually work out very well, per section. We didn't get split up because we tried not to, not because the system was set up to keep people together. Which had its pluses and minuses. Team MacGuyver is an awesome group of people and a lot of fun to be with, but it would have been nice to meet more other people too. Once we got our packets with maps and lists and everything, we drove over there, split up, and started knocking on doors and reminding people to vote (these were all people who'd been identified as likely Kerry/Democratic voters). We marked down if they intended to vote, had voted, bad address, not home, or weren't for Kerry. At the end of the day we turned our packets in and let the organizers (ACT, America Coming Together) deal with it.
On voting day, reunited, we did pretty much the same thing, in a new area again, but this time we were also offering people rides to the polls if they needed them. Andrew and I teamed up that day and spent most of our time in apartments in a run down part of town. During the morning it was pretty bad. We split up this two block long, dingy gray ugly edifice, hall after dirty halls of beat up apartments. Not only was the numbering hard to figure out (I spent the first half-hour knocking on doors a half block down from the section of the building I was looking for), but the management was not at all happy to have us there. I had just finished knocking on all my doors when someone came up and told me to leave, and to avoid the nearest gate because I didn't want to run into the manager. Which meant I had to walk the two blocks to the other end of the parking lot and climb over the closed gate there. And that last half-block was all boarded up...it was a sketchy place. Andrew apparently got caught several times before he reached all the addresses, changing his shirt and/or hat each time before returning. From what he said, the security guard, whom I had successfully avoided, was pretty cool about the whole thing, but had to ask him to leave because the manager was temperamental.
We didn't get as much accomplished that day as before. Our locations were fairly well spread out, and what with the cat and mouse we got separated and I, sans cell phone, wasn't sure where to go. At one point, after we did re-meet, he asked me to just wait while he finished what he'd been working on so we didn't get split up again. We then went through another, relatively nicer, apartment complex down the street aways, split it up and got done fairly quickly.
Charice picked us up and we discussed what to do next (we'd finished pretty much all of what was on our list) and then had lunch in a park. ACT gave us lunches that day and Sunday, but since we'd gotten started so late Monday, we'd had to fend for ourselves. While eating lunch we listened to NPR, I forget which program, maybe Talk of the Nation, but at one point there was a discussion about a web poll of people outside the US on who they would vote for. They didn't actually say what percent Bush got, but it 77% for Kerry and 14% for Nader. Although I think it was something like 70% for Bush among Iraqis with internet access. Not that any of that made much difference.
After lunch we helped Dan and Ankit, who's area was very spread out, and in the evening returned to the second apartment complex we'd been to, to find anyone we'd missed during the day. And we did find a few people. Andrew found someone who needed a ride, so Charice came by, picked her up. I had knocked on the door of Jesus Alvarez, that was the name on the sheet, who wasn't home, but the person I took to be his wife was, as were children. The 8-year-old daughter, the oldest acted as translator, her English was excellent, unaccented, and they decided to call up someone's sister and get a ride to the polling place. It was funny, I told the girl where the polls were and she cocked her hip and all sassy "Isn't that a school?", like I must be crazy. I assured her it was.
While Andrew and I were waiting for Charice to get back, having completed our rounds, we were sitting by the sidewalk and some people walked by. I forget what started it, I think Andrew was encouraging them all to vote. He's vocal like that. And this guy, untucked checkered shirt, kind of unshaven, short straw-colored hair, I think missing a tooth starts talking back and girlfriend pushing a shopping cart, saying his vote's not worth anything, or something like that. But it became a real conversation about the tradeoffs between protecting domestic workers and allowing free markets to force competition and a number of issues on which he was surprisingly well informed. Turns out he was a tech worker in California up until the dot.com bubble burst and/or outsourcing kicked in. Encouraging.
Then Charice came back and we were just kind of sitting there, about to go, when I decided that I should check on that family and see if they needed a ride. So I went, and they still hadn't left. At first when I said I could give her a ride she was reluctant, because she didn't have anywhere to leave the kids. But I said they could come with, and she was excited and they all got their coats on and bundled out to the van. And then we were talking there and I finally realized that her name, which I'd thought was Imelda, was Jesusa Imelda and that it was a typo on the sheet. Probably. Although she seemed to old with too many young kids to be a single mom... In any case, it was a great way to finish the night. She was the last person to that station, just made it in, although she ended up having to fill out a provisional ballot, I don't think she'd registered at her current address. Even so, it felt really good. And that first picture of Charice's is all of us.
After we dropped them off, we went back to the ACT staging ground, turned in our info, and reclaimed MacGuyver. And from there we went to the Tropicana, for the Driving Votes party. Which eventually got broken up for noise complaints, so everyone went to another room to hang out and watch the election results, which also eventually got broken up for noise complaints. Some of Ankit's pictures are about that, he stuck around with security longer than I did.
On Wednesday Joey and Dan flew out early morning, and before leaving we dropped Andrew (and Meera, who'd coordinated our trip out) off at the airport. Which left me, Charice, Ankit, and Mo for the trip back to San Fran. It was a good drive. A little past the state line I was having trouble keeping my eyes on the road and so pulled off at this middle of nowhere exit with this one little store off to the right. We went in, went to the bathroom, got some snacks and drinks... It was a really cool place, one guy built saddles and other tack, real nice work (from what little I know), and the other guy did this thing where he'd take prints and then metallicize them so they were shiny. I'm not really sure how to describe it or what it's called, but it was cool. If you're ever driving along that stretch of I-15, I recommend checking that place, I think it was a two word name and there's nothing visible except that store, out.
Mo told a good story about his family pressuring him to get married. He wants to turn it into a segment on This American Life, so I won't repeat it. He tells it better anyway.
I like the southeastern California, it's so empty, simple, but a lot of texture to the earth, simple colors, yet a lot going on with them. It seemed like it might be a nice place to be a hermit for a while.
Once we hit central CA it started to rain, hard. When it began to clear up, the combination of dense, low clouds and hills to the west made it appear as if the sky was a uniform glowing yellow, something I don't think I've ever seen before. When there started to be some gaps for blue and sun, it was that strange shade of blue that somehow reminds me of photos of Switzerland taken in the late '70s to early '80s. There was an afternoon like that once at Bowdoin early this spring, with melting snow gently dripping from the pine trees.
We weren't sure where to get off to let Mo and Ankit off at the nearest BART station, and got a little lost. But I think they made it back. Charice and I were going to go to the airport, but she was anxious to get home and it would only take one of us to drop the car off anyway. So I let her off at her apartment, and took the van to the Enterprise section of the rental car lot. What with all the rain and driving all that remained of the MacGuyver sign was a few scraps of tape. Oh well. I got on the wrong airport train and had to turn around to get to the BART station there. Got on the bus from 16th and Mission and walked the last few blocks. Stayed up for a while longer and then went to bed. Not the happiest of days.
posted by Colin at 8:52 AM
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