Vote For Change: Stories from Last Weekend
May 21, 2008
This past weekend, Barack Obama supporters continued the work of registering voters as part of Vote for Change, a nationwide voter registration drive that will last through the November 4th general election.
On Saturday, Angelica set up a booth at the Asian Heritage Street Fair in San Francisco. "The highlight was the great number of volunteers of diverse backgrounds who came out to share their enthusiasm," Angelica said. "I really thought it was important for our campaign to be out in full force to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with the Bay Area."
One experience particularly stuck with Angelica:
Larry and Sumie have been eligible to vote for some 40 years, but Larry told me that he’s never felt like it was important until now. ‘The reason is because of Senator Obama,’ he told me. Larry is from Hawaii and truly believes that Barack is a once-in-a-lifetime leader. He signed up to volunteer, and after we spoke, he came back to the booth later in the day to tell me that he was sending more people our way.
At the Pennington Day Community Celebration in Pennington, NJ, volunteers handed out about a dozen forms — and perhaps more impressively, signed up seventy new volunteers. Catherine, one of the volunteers, recounted her experience.
Making eye contact, smiling, saying hello, being enthusiastic, and offering people campaign "button" stickers were all we needed to do to get people to come up to our table, engage in conversation, and sign up to help out with the campaign. We offered stickers to everyone interested, regardless of age. If a family came up, all members went away with stickers. One mother told me that her young daughter became an Obama supporter when she heard that he reads to his daughters. A few stickers ended up adorning the foreheads of family dogs that had been brought along for the dog show.
A number of Obama supporters thanked us for being there. And even a few people whose demeanor clearly indicated that they weren’t supporters nonetheless cracked a smile.
Ed joined three other volunteers at the Lilac Festival in Rochester, New York. Despite torrential rain that cut the registration event to under two hours, the team of four still found success:
I was able to have some interesting dialogue with individuals who were not registered and not interested in voting. I found some success in explaining to them that they did not have to vote if they registered. Being registered would just allow them the opportunity to vote should they want the option at some future date. We received a great many "thank you’s," both from registered and unregistered voters.
All in all, I think it was a rewarding experience for those who participated. I have set up another Voter Registration Event for next weekend at our town’s Memorial Day Services.
The final results from the festival: 44 new voter registrations and 25 people who took forms for a family member or friend who needed to register.
Lisa set up at the Farmer’s Market in Hercules, CA. She found that organizing the event was easier, more rewarding, and even more fruitful than expected:
When we had more volunteers than people who were being registered, a few went off to a local Starbucks and came back with the registration cards. I learned that The Farmer’s Market was a better venue than I had even anticipated. It was a severely hot day, but we still did well in registering people (double what we registered at our assigned spot on the kickoff weekend). We’re hoping to build off this success and even have a table at our big 4th of July event here.
Join this nationwide grassroots movement for change. Find a voter registration event near you, or create your own.
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