One NH Citizen's Primary Day and the Day After

I probably should have stayed up and written a posting on Primary Night itself. I got back home (after a fairly long day in Durham, Dover and briefly Manchester) a not-too-bad hour (11:48pm.) But I went to sleep at my usual hour and woke up to a New Year's Day feeling (only without any football on TV and without a new year to look forward too.)

My election day began with some early morning canvassing, continued with some ballot-clerking at the polling place (which was complicated slightly by the Obama people), followed by more canvassing and phone calling in the afternoon— and I made it to Edwards HQ in Manchester just in time for his speech.  The next day I helped a little with tearing down the local campaign office: my last act as a loyal volunteer was to recycle the printer cartridges.

I probably should have stayed up and written a posting on Primary Night itself. I got back home (after a fairly long day in Durham, Dover and briefly Manchester) a not-too-bad hour (11:48pm.) But I went to sleep at my usual hour and woke up to a New Year's Day feeling (only without any football on TV and without a new year to look forward too.) The morning after, like Election Day itself, was unseasonably warm, and the signs in the snow bank are leaning at odd angles.

I didn't kick off my election as early as the real fanatics, but I was out on the streets with a clipboard and some "door hangers" (those glossy oblong handouts with a hole for the doorknob on the top) by 7:30 a.m. My candidate John Edwards is the candidate of the forgotten middle class, and Dover is a forgotten middle class town. It is one of the oldest cities in America, but not much of note to the outside world has ever happened here. (It occurs to me that maybe this just means this is a peaceful community.) My operation was supposed to be a 7 a.m. canvas, but actually ringing doorbells seemed like a bad idea because it was so early (although in fact most of my people were already off at work.) I talked to three people. One man was busy trying to get his old (1980's vintage) Ford pickup truck started. (I used to have an 1989 Escort, which ran great but was hard to start, so I knew what I was going to.) The second man was incensed because I had rung his doorbell (and he was right, this was the one doorbell I actually rang.) I was already crossing Locust Street when he came to the door and yelled at me: I claimed it wasn't me and hoped he would blame the Hillary people who were also working the same turf as me at the time. The third man, whom I was crossing Locust Street to talk to, was a friendly dude who said he wasn't voting, because he was sick of politics, but if he did vote he would have voted for Edwards, who was a good guy. He was coded "Lean JRE."

Then I went off to be a ballot clerk at my local poling place, at Oyster River High School in Durham. Turnout was pretty good, but not as good as I expected. We ended up with about 3000 walkup voters and 750 absentees out of a little over 7000 voters. My shift got off to a bad start because a lawyer with the Attorney General's office was looking for irregularities, and instead of just saying "yes ma'am" I tried to defend myself when she stepped in on behalf of the Obama people. The law says campaigns can send poll watchers who can sit behind a ropeline to observe the process. It also says that voters' name must be announced out loud: the original purpose of this rule is to ensure that the the voter and the ballot clerks know who is voting. The Obama people used this rule to set up their own checkin process (which is of dubious legality and also a huge waste of time: the concept is that you run the lists every so often back to the headquarters and then canvas the people who haven't voted yet— but by the time you call your people a few hours later, half of them have already gone ahead and voted spontaneously.) The volunteer assigned to my station was deaf and couldn't hear the names when the clerks spoke to the voters in a normal conversational tone. So I had to pause and shout out the names, which slowed down the process and annoyed the voters. And a few times, the volunteer reached over the ropeline and stopped people, which was literally over the line. The Obama people eventually sent higher ranking volunteers over, including a former Congressional nominee, and even though this seemed like a waste of the professionals' time, the poll-watching went a lot smoother after that.

I spent the afternoon canvassing and phoning in Dover and then went and help edwith the vote count. In New Hampshire, every town uses paper ballots. We use an Accu-Vote counter which didn't seem 100% accurate, although any inaccuracies were fair: the poll workers were very conscientious. The machine didn't need to be a hooked up to a phone line or the internet: it is basically a fax machine-like scanner hooked up to a PC as well as a sorter (one bin is for ballots which the scanner could read, the other for those which needed to be counted by hand.) One security risk is that the vote counter doubles as a ballot box (although you can't get a count till the last ballot goes in.) Another big problem is that it easy to skip or double count ballots, especially absentee ballots: sometimes the sorter rejects a read ballot but sometimes the scanner rejects a ballot: in the first case, the moderator opens up the locked box and puts the ballot in the bin and in the second case, we try running the ballot through one or two times. We had more write-ins than usual thanks to a meaningless Vice Presidential preference poll.

Finally I drove over to Manchester, listening to McCain's speech on the way over on the radio, and arrived literally just in time for Edwards's speech. In fact, I followed his entourage into the building and ended up in the green room. I got to help John's parents, who are two very quiet and unselfassuming people, into the green room, even though I totally didn't belong there. I had put in some time volunteering but not enough to merit being part of the backdrop for his speech— and of course I was feeling guilty because frankly our numbers were bad. Yes, we knocked off Richardson and even Kucinich (although Dennis will keep soldiering on till the bitter end), and yes we made this effectively a three-person race, and yes we did it with a relatively small budget. But 17% isn't much more than Edwards got in 2004. I probably could have stayed in the green room: the ubiquitous and untiring John "JJ" Joyal, who led the entourage into the green room, was ready to give me a sign to wave, but then some drunk staffer, apparently a press aide of some sort, tried to do the "sir, you will have to..." routine but was too blitzed to get the words out.  Even though I was POed that she was drinking in the green room when our candidate was about to give a very important speech on national TV, I apologized and made my way back outside to squeeze my way in through the main door. (The field workers from the Seacoast region were all still sober, as were the local volunteers, but there were hordes of 20- and 30-somethings from elsewhere who had arrived early and had decimated the open bar. Don't worry, they all had designated drivers.  But I was still irked: the workers really should have waited and had their own after-party somewhere else AFTER the speech.  And I was a little surprised: up till now this had been a very disciplined campaign.)

The next afternoon, I stopped by and helped our local campaign kiddies dismantle the office for a hour or two.  They weren't hung over, except from their months-long adrenaline rush.  They're not sure if they still have jobs or not: their marching orders at the moment were to throw all the trash away, return the rented and borrowed items and report to the state HQ in Manchester when they were done.  My last act of assistance was to round up all the printer cartridges and take them to Staples.

--Timothy Horrigan