I spent a good part of my senior year of college volunteering for the McGovern campaign in a half-dozen Northeast states, mostly canvassing door-to-door. I believed then (and still do now) that electing George McGovern president would have been the fastest and surest way to end the U.S. war in Vietnam. In the fall of 1972 I had arrived in Philadelphia for my first year of medical school, and on election day I cut my anatomy class to serve as a pollwatcher for the McGovern campaign. I’m assigned to a polling place in South Philadelphia, every bit the tight-knit white ethnic enclave depicted in the Rocky movie franchise.
Bright and early, I arrive at the polling place on South 5th and Daly Street. Everyone in the room appears to know each other, except for me, the obvious outsider, sporting a beard and long hair yet (at a time when that meant you were a hippie, not a truckdriver). I present my credential to the Judge of Elections. I had been issued a Constitutional Party pollwatcher certificate, as Mayor Frank Rizzo’s Democratic Party hated McGovern, and the McGovern campaign knew it. A few minutes later, three guys enter. Two of them show pollwatcher certificates – also from the Constitutional Party - to the Judge of Elections, who declares that since only one pollwatcher from a given party can be inside the polling place at a time, two of us have to leave. The third guy, who identifies himself as the ward Democratic committeeman, says that since he knows the other two, and they’re locals, they get to stay and I have to leave. After some discussion, we agree to rotate, with one inside and two outside.
When it’s my turn inside, I watch as the committeeman accompanies voters into the polling booth, sometimes two at a time. I object to the Judge of Elections, he waves me off. I go outside to the pay phone (it’s 1972: no cell phones, no computers, no Internet), call McGovern headquarters. I’m told that this is happening all over the city, advised to keep documenting these events, and to check that these voters did not have disability certificates entitling them to assistance in the polling booth (they don’t). I’m also informed that those other two poll-watcher certificates are phonies, that court proceedings are underway at that moment to have them revoked, and that I should so inform the Judge of Elections. I do, and that pisses off the other two pollwatchers, one of whom storms off. Some short time later, a white Cadillac Eldorado pulls up, and a guy gets out – slicked-back hair, big open collar, gold chain, white belt, bell bottoms – and asks me if I had accused the other pollwatchers of having phony certificates. I tell him what I was told on the phone. He says there are court proceedings going on against me as well, because I’m a non-resident pollwatcher. He gets back in the car and leaves.
A couple hours later, I’m inside the polling place when Eldorado Man returns, hands the Judge of Elections a piece of paper which he says is an injunction directed at non-resident pollwatchers, and that I have to leave. I look at it, see that it applies to all Constitutional Party pollwatchers, and point out to the Judge that all three of us would have to vacate. This makes the two other guys very angry. A local woman working the voter list takes me aside, says into my ear to watch out for Eldorado Man because "he's a punk". Outside, I’m approached by a detective from the District Attorney’s office who asks to see my pollwatcher certificate, says I’m OK, then gets into a conversation with Eldorado Man and the other two pollwatchers, which ends with his confiscating their certificates.
I stay outside the polling place passing out McGovern leaflets to the arriving voters as the other two pollwatchers join a group of guys on the opposite corner, who watch me and occasionally point at me and laugh in an unpleasant manner. At one point, I fumble and drop my leaflets, and as I’m down on my hands and knees picking them up, I become aware that the guys from across the street are now surrounding me. I try to resign myself to the likelihood that I'm going to get my butt kicked for the cause - which really doesn't make me any less scared – but they don’t touch me and presently retreat to their corner.
As the polls close, the guys on the corner motion me to join them as a station wagon pulls up, the driver gets out and passes around cups of coffee. A big guy puts his arm around me and, laughing, tells me “We got nothing against you, kid. Hell, we don’t even care who wins this election. It’s just that this morning the boss calls us up and tells us to get down to the polls and give the McGovern kid a hard time. Here kid, no hard feelings, have a donut."
What had happened? It was only months later that it became publicly known that there had been a deal struck between the Nixon-Agnew campaign and the Philly Democratic Party - to have their people vote Nixon-Agnew at the top of the ballot and all the Dems downballot. But to make the deal work, someone would have to go into the booth with the voters to show them how to split the ticket on the big old mechanical voting machine - which none of them had ever done, they’d always just pulled that big Democratic lever. That meant that there couldn't be any unfriendly pollwatchers inside.
Epilogue: there was an investigation into the vote fraud. I was interviewed by the Philly police and gave a statement. Eldorado Man, a former prizefighter and state rep, went to trial in the summer of '74. I was subpoenaed but was spending that summer in a free clinic in rural Oregon, and in the end the DA's office decided not to fly me round-trip to testify. Eldorado Man was convicted and fined $500. In 1987, he was found guilty of conspiring with Philly's reputed mob boss to extort $1 million from a waterfront developer and sentenced to ten years in prison; he did five.
McGovern won Philadelphia but by a much-less-than-usual Democratic margin, not enough to carry Pennsylvania, which was to join every other state but Massachusetts in choosing Nixon — one of the biggest electoral college defeats in U.S. history. Now — in the runup to Election 2020, with its hackable voting systems, Russian subterfuge, voter suppression — I am haunted by the events of 1972, when the only other presidential candidate with whom I felt such a close concordance as I do with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren was buried by an incumbent almost as egregious as Donald Trump. I am hoping against hope — and canvassing and phone-banking — that history, this time, doesn’t repeat itself.