(no subject)

[rivka]

I've signed up with the Obama campaign to go to Pennsylvania on Election Day, to help get out the vote. They've asked me to go to Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, which is a small conservative city in the southern part of the state. It's about 80 miles north of Baltimore.

The form e-mail I got assigning me to Harrisburg says that I'll either be canvassing or working the phones; I assume that on Election Day itself I'm more likely to be asked to work the phones, but it's possible that they'll still be going door to door even then.

So far I'm very impressed with their organization. They have a webpage aimed at "border state volunteers," people who live in safe blue or safe red states who want to travel someplace where the election will be close. They encouraged me to come for a four-day trip (and I wanted to!), but I was also free to sign up for whichever days I could actually travel. My field office match came complete with a link to a 16-page PDF booklet called the "PA Border States Volunteer Welcome Packet," which provided everything from the phone numbers and addresses of every field office in the state to a list of hotels offering discounted stays to a suggested packing list with wardrobe suggestions. The booklet also had a brief guide to the PA political scene and the parameters of the race in PA.

I was particularly struck by this:

Thanks to our hard work registering voters, there are currently 438,536 more registered Democrats in Pennsylvania than there were at the time of the election in 2004. Meanwhile, there are 175,472 fewer registered Republicans than in 2004. Democrats have nearly doubled their registration advantage of 580,208 voters in 2004 to 1,194,216 voters
through October 2008. The Obama campaign registered over 350,000 of these new Democrats.

I don't know how necessary I really am to the get-out-the-vote effort. Recent polls in Pennsylvania haven't been particularly close, for all that the McCain campaign has been insisting that they can win there. I guess I just want to feel like I've done my part, and there's not much I can do toward that end as a Maryland resident. Plus, I think it will be fun.

How about you, or at least, the Americans among you? Do you have Election Day plans? Do you live in a state where your vote might make a difference?

Comments

[lissamc.livejournal.com]

I live in Arizona. I realized early into this election that if it comes down to my vote making the difference as to whether or not McCain loses his home state, he has fouled things up so badly that the rest of the country is going Obama by a landslide. This is not going to stop me from voting however. There are some initiatives that need to be smacked down. Hard. Besides, I figure voting gives me my four year bitching license.