I was perhaps one of the few volunteers at the bar last night who didn't crack up into tears when the news rolled in that Ohio had turned blue for the first time since Clinton's win.
It was the confirmation of President Elect Barack Obama's win that did for my composure, and after three weeks of furious amounts of data entry and paper cuts and late nights, this was the final verdict that kicked off the celebrations.
I don't get to vote, but I got to take part in one of the most memorable volunteer efforts I've ever had the pleasure to witness.
In my last entry, I talked a little about what I was doing in my battleground state of SW Ohio. I was entering data, collected by canvassers and phonebankers; spending four - five hours every night doing so for roughly three weeks.
On Election Day, my role in the local effort changed, and I became a Houdini. The Houdini Project was birthed by the Obama campaign, and these volunteers were intended to be sent to places that did not have Democratic volunteer poll observers. Our job: To go to our designated polling location and to check off the names of people who'd already voted at 11am, then call a Pollwatch number and enter the 4-digit ID numbers of those who'd done so. This gave the campaign real-time numbers and ideas of voter turnout. It was a large responsibility, and a significant one.
I had to be awake at oh-god-thirty in order to get to the local Democratic staging area. I was there before 8am, and since my job as a Houdini didn't kick in until 10:30am, I helped out by signing in the 9:30am canvassing volunteers, who would be focusing on Obama supported neighbourhoods with a high density of voters who were considered flakey. Four wards in particular were marked as top priority: they would be walked three times over the course of the day. The first pass was just to place door hangers on the front doors of residences.
These door hangers had specific polling place information listed on them. I know this because we spent Sunday and Monday nights going cross-eyed sorting these things out, counting them to ensure we had enough, and ensuring the correct wards were listed for each section (giving a voter an incorrect voting location can be considered voter fraud). I gained six brutal paper cuts from these things in the process of sorting them on my thumb alone!
The second pass was to knock on those doors and ask people if they'd voted yet. So was the third pass. The idea simply being to bug the hell out of these flakey voters and make them get out there.
The canvassers were stupendous. We had someone here at the staging area at the local community centre who was a designated runner: if a canvasser came across someone who said they wanted to vote but didn't have transportation, they could call back to our staging location and we would send our designated runner out with their car and take them over to their polling place to do so. Some of the canvassers however decided to take matters into their own hands and did it themselves, without any prompting from us, because they wanted to and felt the urgency was so great.
My job as a Houdini was pretty darned simple. At 10:30am, I walked over to the local elementary school and waited outside until 11am, when the list of those who'd already voted would (or rather should) be posted up outside the polling location. With my checklist of voters, I marked off from that list who had already shown up and voted. They hadn't actually posted the list when I went in, so I had to ask them for it in order to do my job. I spent about fifteen minutes in the school foyer with the precious list ticking off who'd voted. That done, I pegged it back to the community centre and rather than entering in the numbers via a cellphone to Pollwatch, I had to do it online because the Pollwatch number system was down. I got back to the centre at 11:30am, and was done with entering voter ID numbers by 11:38am, that's how easy the job was. Easy, but important.
For the rest of the day, I was on my feet constantly helping volunteers as they came and went, signing their sheets in and out, and when the critical canvassing lists were reprinted, sorting the new ones and marking them visibly with their ward and turf, cajoling returning volunteers into going back out again or maybe getting on the phones to call people and get them out to the polls, keeping tabs on the phonebankers, and making sure the place wasn't too messy with unused door hangers and disposable plates and abandoned coffee cups so the cleanup later wouldn't be hard (and it wasn't). It was pretty much nonstop with a few lulls in activity here and there, but I loved every moment of it. I loved being able to help and to know what I was talking about.
The day all passed in a blur of activity, and when the last posters had been taken down and the remainder of the signs had been put into the car, we all hugged like crazy and agreed to meet back up at a bar in West Chester that a volunteer had rented out for the night - until 3am!
I fled home with my husband, fed the cats and ourselves, and we made the drive out there. The parking lot was teeming with cars and people, and the mood was overwhelmingly upbeat - and as we stepped in the doors, at 10pm EST, we were told the incredible news: Ohio had gone Blue.
It was nothing short of incredible from that moment on. Everyone cheered the results and the projections as they came in. Florida went Blue. Wisconsin went Blue. Iowa went Blue. And before even the West Coast added its voice to the proceedings, it was clear: Barack Obama was going to be our next President.
We roared, we hugged, we laughed, we exchanged "terrorist fist bumps", and most significantly, perhaps, we cried, because everyone in that bar had given something of themselves over the last months of this intense and incredible campaign, and now we knew all that lack of sleep, all those long hours slaving over data, all those headaches about who'd signed in or signed out, all that fast food that replaced real food, all that anxiety - it was all worth it.
Yes, we did.
So many people said that the organisation of this campaign was incredible - and it was. And it was the volunteers and the staffers who kept that organisation together. From day one when my husband and I walked into the office, we felt like we were among old friends we just hadn't met yet. It's that sentiment and vibe that's made this long hard slog so worthwhile - and more crucially, we got to meet people from our own community, people we would never have met, and will still be here when the out-of-state staff have gone home. These people are what our country hinges on now to keep this momentum going.
To all of you who took time out of your schedule to knock on doors, to phonebank, to collate data, to organise buses from churches to your local board of elections, to hand out water to folks standing in interminable lines, I thank you.
To those who voted, who endured those same lines to ensure your vote, I thank you.
To all of you who are not even in this country but dared to hope with us: I thank you.
To Grandmama Obama, for helping to raise the man we know today as President Elect: Thank you, wherever you are.
And to Barack Obama: Thank you. For making the words "community organiser" significant, and making the idea of hope being enough to change the world really mean something.
I will remember this for the rest of my life. I couldn't vote, but I still meant something. I've forged a lot of new bonds and friendships in that time. It's been a trip.
Now the real work begins.
Don't let up for a moment, America. Apathy, more than anything else, is our primary enemy. Stay involved. Stay active. And be ready, because January 20th is closer than you think.