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Sunday, November 2. 2008
Change
They are waiting ten hours to cast their votes. Jeez, I was fuming because once I registered at the Registrar of Voters the wait to cast my vote was about 15 minutes.Ten hours!
That’s in Georgia, which is one of the 32 states that have early voting. It’s no longer called absentee voting, it’s early voting. At the San Diego County Registrar of Voters No one asked why I could not vote on Election Day. They just offered me the opportunity to cast my vote early. Either vote at the Registrar or take the mail-in ballot home, do it there and mail it in.
Early voting was created in large part because of the long lines and waits we saw in places like Ohio where people were going home without casting their votes due to the long waits during the 2004 General Election. On Friday, four days before Election Day, people were waiting ten hours in Georgia.
In Florida the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law allowing for the polls to be open only eight hours per day for early voting. On Wednesday, the Republican governor, seeing his state’s citizens waiting in long lines for nearly ten hours, extended the voting hours to 12 per day.
From the reports in and from various news organizations, the waits have been long — ten hours in Georgia — but there haven’t been any problems, that the people waiting have taken it in stride, some even bringing chairs because they know they will have to wait, sometimes in stifling heat as in Georgia and Florida, or in the crisp chill of Fall in Ohio. Those waiting to vote are doing so out of a sense of duty and they wait, determined to have their votes cast.
After the debacle of Ohio in 2004, those who were disenfranchised by the inadequacies want to make sure they vote and that their votes are counted.
It’s no surprise two-thirds of those early ballots are being cast for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The Obama “machine” has changed the face of campaigning, with it’s millions of volunteers spreading out over the country keeping the energy and enthusiasm high, despite the pundits practically declaring Obama the winner.
What truly changes campaigning though is their grasp and use of the Internet. Two-thirds of new registered voters were recruited by the Democrats, the Obama machine in particular. They did it better than anyone else using the Internet to get the job done better. They have more people — volunteers — on the ground than their Republican opponents precisely because they used the Internet to spark their campaign.
The latest failed jab at Obama by the McCain campaign is all these “undocumented” donors to his campaign — nearly six hundred million dollars worth of undocumented donors. The reason they are undocumented is that the vast majority of Obama’s supporters have made donations of less than $200.00. That’s significant. That’s roughly 3,000,000 people who got involved in the Obama campaign on their own, primarily through the Internet, in response to the message they heard from candidate.McCain has tried to make an issue of these “undocumented” donors, since the Bill Ayers storyline hasn’t worked, nor has Joe the Plumber caught fire, but it isn’t working. McCain can’t compete with Obama on the issues, so he tries to create doubt about Obama’s “associations,” one of those being these undocumented donors. A reality check: Can you imagine any campaign producing a list of 3,000,000 donors?
How many undocumented donors does McCain have? One of the truths of McCain’s campaign has been that many of his criticisms of Obama have come back to bite him in the ass. He calls himself a “maverick,” and yet he admits to voting with President Bush, and therefore his party, 90% of the time. Bill Ayers, well that brings up McCain’s association with G. Gordon Liddy, who was convicted of a major crime and advocated killing federal law enforcement officers.
And the other truth is, the very lobbyists that McCain once railed against are now running his campaign and raised the money to do so. Using the old paradigm of finding rich donors who can influence other rich people to donate as well. The down side of that truth for McCain: so few people wanted to donate money to the McCain campaign that their best avenue for having enough was to opt for public financing.
In a reversal of campaigns past, the Democrat in the presidential race is far better funded than the Republican. Much of that can be attributed to the toxic climate for Republicans, but a big reason Obama is much better funded is that his team picked up where Howard Dean left off in 2004: using the Internet to not only gain support, but to activate that support into action and more importantly, to raise money. Pulling out the credit card and making that online donation was action for those millions of voters and once they did that, they became invested in seeing their candidate win so they were inspired to help register voters and get out the vote.
That is why we see people standing in line for as long as ten hours to cast their vote a week or more before Election Day: Obama has energized a large group of voters who either felt disenfranchised or saw any candidate to be just the same old same old.
Barack Obama represents change — no, Barack Obama is change. Not just for the African-American community, who are registered and voting in record numbers, but for many others who have looked at the parade of candidates past and given up on the system.
“Change,” to quote Sheryl Crow, “Will do you good.”
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