So a bunch of us down in Dallas spent the weekend, and Monday, stampeding around the city with clipboards and registering the electorate to vote. We went to traditionally Democratic parts of the city and hit the malls, hit the retail stores, hit the groceries, the Texas Workforce Commission. We got thrown out of several retail locations due to the company's non-soliciation party, but they were all very nice, and we'd just move on. By Monday we were trading stories of where we got thrown out of. Three different batches of voter registrars had gone to the
same store and gotten thrown out on the same day... but not before they'd registered about 15 or 20 voters each. :)
On Monday, we had gotten permission to set up downstairs from the main elections office. So we were able to take a lot of the load off of them. There were four of us downstairs registering voters and we were busy throughout the day. We got the easy ones and sent the hard ones upstairs to register. Due to our staffing, lines were short. At one point we probably had 10 people in the lobby with clipboards filling out forms.
We gave up counting, although we tried to keep as much of the info on the newly registered voters as we could, for GOTV. We also don't know how many were D and how many were R, as Texas does not require you to state party affiliation when you register to vote, and we were usually trying to be nonpartisan so as to fly under the radar. However, I can't help but think, based on the way we targeted Democratic areas, that we did pretty well.
About 5 or 6 p.m. on Monday, all of the registrars started to head over to a local pub to relax. We had previously gotten the word from the elections office that deputy registrars could register voters on the hand-carry forms up until midnight, and the mail-in forms had to be postmarked Oct. 4. We were hoping to do some more voter reg at the pub. Then one of the registrars headed down to the Main Post Office to drop off some mail-in forms and called and told us that the place was HOPPING.
So a bunch of us got off of our comfy seats and headed down there. When we got there we just said, OH WOW. It looked like April 15th. The place was mobbed. The parking lot was FULL. The postal cop told us, "I've never seen anything like this!"
A post office official told us that the last postmark was supposed to be at 8 but they were holding it open til 9 as a courtesy. We started registering Dallas county people on the hand-carry forms and directing others to white cards and to the special bin where the white voter reg mailers needed to go. We probably had 5 registrars down there at one point and I think we collected at least 100 green cards. We kept waiting to be kicked out or for the PO to tell us that they were closing the voter reg bin... but neither ever happened. We even registered several postal workers and cops.
They held the postmark open all the way up until midnight. YAY POST OFFICE! At 11:55 we had three people, one filling out white card, two green cards, and as the guy was trying to wheel the bin away we were like, "Wait, one more!"
It was an absolutely FANTASTIC way to end the voter reg madness marathon.
See our blog at:
http://www.dallasforkerry.com/blog/journal/journal_comments.asp?JournalID=10
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