I opened up dairies to describe some of the process for what's it like doing the grassroots movement for recalls in Wisconsin a few weeks ago:
Here, doing door-to-door,
and
Here, on polling day for the SC race
(That second one I didn't ever follow up on because I got ill the next day and sort of forgot about posting the update and now it seems so late after the fact that it wouldn't be topical anymore - but the summary is that the results on polling day were very good.)
Now I intend to do the same for the effort to check the petitions handed in by the Republicans to see if they are bogus enough to throw out. There was only 1 week to get the task done, so the volunteers need to be working fast. I'm donating a few hours of time Sunday and again on Tuesday - It's not much but it's what I can spare. I hope to give an accounting here again of what the process feels like for someone who's never done anything like this before.
I might have some restrictions on what I can say about it though. I'll make sure to ask when I'm there about what can and can't be disclosed about it before I post anything. Given that these petitions have some laws regarding privacy I suspect I'll have to be careful about things like giving specific examples of specific signatures. Also, perhaps not everyone in the room working the computers will want to be photographed, so I'll have to watch out about that too. But for what I can report, I'll be putting up a followup here after the fold when I get back.
My first shift is 3pm-6pm Sunday (Central time, of course).
[Update: I'm sitting in the DPW office now and I'm waiting for the explanation of what to do, but given what I see so far about privacy disclaimers, I don't think I can do any photos of the place - there's a lot of privacy restrictions. For one thing, I can say, HOLY CRAP there's a lot of people here. It's easter sunday and I discovered that this place is filled to the limit- every room every little tiny side closet, every inch of space is filled with volunteers. It's amazing. I'd estimate at LEAST 80 people are here I saw with my own eyes and I haven't seen everyone yet.]
[Update 2: report below the fold]
Okay, so first off, a few disappointments - not in the actual effort itself, but in my ability to give you all interesting detailed information about it.
In a nutshell, I can't. On my way out I asked the people at the desk how much I should avoid divulging about the operation, and I was surprised by just how much they wanted me to keep under my hat. I expected that there would be privacy rules about the signees themselves having to be kept secret (i.e. don't take a photo of what the form looks like, because then I'm showing the signatures publicly). I also expected that taking a photo of the banks of volunteers was also something they'd rather I not do (because not everyone who volunteers time wants to have their photo published, and asking a whole room full of 30 people for individual permission is a bit of a mess.) What surprised me is how many other things they wanted to be kept secret.
But upon further explanation, it makes sense why they want most of the details kept secret for the time being. Basically, they'll be required to let the lawyers for the opposition see their challenges to the signatures when they get handed back in, but they don't want the opposition's lawyers to be able to know ahead of time what to expect. They want them to be kept to the minimum legally allowed time window to rebut the challenges. Telling them ahead of time what to expect would be helping them.
So, it is with sad heart that I can't really offer you the followup I promised about details of the system.
Here's the vague details I can give:
- The purpose of the volunteers was two-fold: (1) Data entry so a computer can then look for possible problems that you wouldn't notice by hand, and (2) if something looks suspicious, flag it for the Dem's legal team to go look at later. There were specific things we were told to watch out for, but I won't say what they were.
- The attendance was phenomenal. The number of volunteers clearly exceeded what the Dems expected. Even on Easter sunday, every available folding table, every available flat surface, every available electrical outlet was occupied by someone typing into a computer looking at sheets. I asked people who had been there longer than me and they said it was like that all the time since it started. I won't give exact numbers, but every room I saw, every little nook and cranny and supply closet had volunteers in them in the small little office above Ancora Coffee, located a block away from the Capitol where the historic protests had been going on before. It makes sense now why they were saying if you have a laptop please bring it. (Any laptop will do so long as it has a web browser.)
- I won't give details of how the progress is going, but I was told it was getting done faster than they expected.
- I was one of the people stuck in a little side room with the main rooms full. There were 4 other volunteers in my little room with me and we bantered with each other while we went about the task at hand. One nice thing about doing it this way is that the camaraderie helped make an otherwise mundane task into something easy that the time just flew by. (It would have been different if people did it by logging in and doing it from home, as the Dems had once considered but abandoned because of security risks exposing it to anyone to mess with)
- I met State Senators Mark Miller and Chris Larson who were there to thank the volunteers and made a walk around all the rooms shaking hands.
I wish I could say more about some of the things I saw (especially one particular thing about how the Republicans did their petition forms that was really really stupid - and I'm not talking about how the people signed it - I mean how the forms themselves were laid out. The ones I remember using printed by the Dems were a lot more careful about being able to get all the required data. I won't say more than that.)