corrente

GOTV time, by raison de fem:

Those fresh-faced kids at the tribal community college handing out voter registration cards are serious. Organized. Dedicated. They have to be nonpartisan, working for the New Voter Project (it’s a 501(c)3), but the implication is clear in their rap: who’s looking out for the young voters?

They're far better at reaching the skaters and pinkhairs than an alter kockus like my ownself. I watched them for awhile and talked to a couple of them to see how things were going. Last week they were at the library in Nowheresville. Week before that I saw some working a crowd at the mall in a nearby larger town.

Their line goes like this: what do the candidates talk about? Social security, medicare, and such. Who's talking about the draft, drug laws, finding jobs after graduation? Are the "young folks" concerns being heard?

And so forth. They point out that the pols know old folks get out and vote, while young folks sit at home and play video. So the young folks get written off along with "youth issues." I point out that a lot of "old folks" have similar concerns, and she says "well, yeah, but we know you already vote. Gotta get the kids out." So I ask how many she thinks will vote for Kerry and how many for Bush. She tells me she thinks the kids who would vote Bush are already registered for the most part, so most of the ones they're registering are probably more left-leaning, and for the most part they think voting is useless, so it’s harder to get them in.

Is she saying she thinks more lefty kids think voting is useless? Yeah. Especially the skaters and anarchists, she says.

Wow, I think. Is that true? Is the right more organized? Well, yeah. For one thing, they have the churches. And don’t think for a minute that the churches aren’t pushing the GOP "values" agenda. They are. Plus, right-wing parents probably push their kids more into voting. I know the Mormons hereabouts do.

Another interesting thing the NVP girls told me—yeah, they were all girls, no boys, which is interesting, too—is that they found out a lot of the county clerks were dumping new voter registrations in a room for "later processing" if anything looked like it was left blank or wrong. Some clerks are "overwhelmed" with new voters. They told me that clerks were telling people that registering through a third party might mean that their registrations wouldn't ever make it to the office, since third-party registration groups were paid by the number of registrations they did and didn't really care about sending them in. The NVP-ers said, yeah, that's true, we get paid that way. But, they said, our hearts really are in it.

Proof? Well, they give each new registrant a card to fill out, and tell them if they fill it out and give it them, they'll follow up with a phone call a few weeks later to make sure they got their card and know where their polling place is. They tell me they check each card—which they do, I watched—and take them in a batch to the clerk's office in each county they work. I think they’re serious. Nobody's getting rich at this work. I won’t say how much they were making, but it's bubkes for how much high-energy work they were doing.

Registration deadline's coming for most of the states hereabouts. Crunch time. I get some more registration cards from the NVP folks. Just in case.

And maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning. Not long after that, outside the library where I use the computers when I'm in town, I met a very pretty Native girl decked out head to toe in Kerry-Edwards stickers, shirt, even bumperstickers plastered all over her pants, hat and bookbag. We're outside in the smoker's area, so I ask her if this is her first presidential election. She says yeah, and she's excited. I ask her if she's taking any shit for her Kerry getup, and she says yeah, some, but she's also getting a lot of positive vibes, especially from boys. I tell her to keep up the good work. Girl power!

[post author, raison de fem]

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