I canvassed Saturday morning and again yesterday afternoon.
I knocked on a lot of doors (114) and talked with a lot of people, almost all of them African-American. Many of them were well tuned-in to the issues in this race, and perceived all of the things that we, here, know and dislike about Mitt Romney. It really makes me reflect on WTF is wrong with white people (of which I am one)? I guess it is the power of rationalization to stretch things to fit the picture you want to apply, even in the face of lots of evidence it's flat-out wrong.
Anyway, I got sent to another county yesterday and went out on my own since I am an "experienced canvasser" now. Talked to all of these great people, whose knowledge of the voting process was not as good as their knowledge of the issues. I only had 29 of my target people answer their doors, but there were groups of people outdoors in the neighborhoods and I answered a lot of questions and handed out sample ballots and early voting information. In fact I ran out of sample ballots halfway through and had to go back to HQ to get more.
Unfortunately I spoke with one woman who was turned away from the polls because she didn't have an ID. She was on my list and therefore a registered voter. The organizer said there have been other instances of this; she's been reporting them and will again.
The organizer said she's been working there since May and they've registered 150 people a week in that time. These are a lot of the people who were on my list.
I recruited a volunteer who doesn't have a car but does have a computer and will make calls from her room in the public housing authority complex. I had a couple of kids ask me about voting, and I asked them in turn if they were going to vote when they were old enough, and they shouted, "yes!" And I spoke to a man with beautiful gray dreadlocks who was sweeping his porch, who told me with a kind of calm satisfaction that, as a felon, he had had his voting rights restored and voted for the first time in 2008 and was going to vote again this year.
There were some interesting dynamics in some of the groups I talked with. One young man initially told me he'd already voted. Then, as the group got talking, he must have felt he was missing out because he took me aside and said, "I told you a story." He didn't know how to go about voting. He and I went through various papers he had and settled on his Medicaid ID as the best to use for registration. I hope I gave him enough information to enable him to follow through.
I'm working on arranging time next weekend to do another three shifts.