Get Out The Vote

It was already dark, and it was getting cold fast. For the fifth time that day, I knocked on the door of the house trailer at 339 Coyote Lane. This time, there was a sedan in the carport. Someone was home.

The light over the door came on. I backed up and squinted. The door opened.

I didn’t feel like smiling, but I smiled anyway. “Hi!” I said. “My name’s Dan, and I’m with a group called MoveOn PAC. We’re trying to make sure everyone gets to the polls today to vote.”

The lady had a thickly creased smoker’s face. She cracked a smile back. “I already voted.”

“Great.” I put a check mark next to her name on the list—MoveOn’s list—of registered Democrats who didn’t vote in the last election.

“And was that a vote for Kerry?” I looked up and smiled again.

You’d think I’d just grown horns. She nearly threw herself off balance reaching for the open screen door. It slammed shut sharply.

I put her down as a Bush supporter and walked back through the darkened carport to the street. Jennifer was waiting next to the car.

“That’s it for me,” I said. “That’s the whole list.”

I pulled my cellphone out of my pants pocket and hit redial. Jim answered. He was still driving one more voter to the polls. He said he’d meet us at the 7-11 on Central Avenue.

After three long days, Precinct 330, City of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, was starting to feel familiar. We’d been up and down every street a dozen times. We’d climbed a lot of apartment stairs. We’d knocked on a lot of doors. We’d talked to a lot of people.

In the 7-11 lot, the three of us reviewed our list. We guessed we’d turned out about 75 voters for Kerry. It’s hard to tell. Some people say they’ve voted already when they haven’t. Surely, some would have voted anyway.

But there were others who, although registered, had never voted before. There were the community college students living with no furniture in the Whispering Sands Apartments. There was the young woman who, being quadriplegic, hadn’t been able to complete her absentee ballot in time to mail it. There was another young woman with her face all bruised and scraped-up who—on my third visit—said yes, she’d been to the polls, and would get her husband to vote too, whenever he got home.

Jim was still pretty hyped, but I could tell he was exhausted. More than once, he’d been stood up by people who asked for a ride to the polls at a certain time and then weren’t there when he came by. He’d been threatened. He’d seen kids with no shoes crossing a glass-strewn parking lot in a snow flurry. Like us, he’d seen how hard it is to convince people whose lives are difficult and transient and sometimes impoverished that it would make a damn bit of help if they took the next hour to go stand in line and punch some holes in a computer card.

But he’d tried. How he’d tried, with dogged determination and a lawyerly persistence and attention to detail. He’d outworked Jennifer and me put together.

There was no point, really, in going over the list again, but we did it anyway. Lydia and Lucretia Dillard? Voted. Natasha Poole? Wasn’t there at 7 this morning, no answer since. Anita Padilla? Said she voted; maybe she didn’t; nothing we can do about it now.

Polls are closed. It’s over. Let’s get out of the cold.