Election Protection
What a long couple of days. After spending a night bussing out to Pennsylvania to arrive before the polls opened, we were held up getting our poll assignments and equipment at the large church where we were supposed to be processed. By the time my group was sent out it was 8AM or so and the polls were already open. I was in a group of 3 with 2 other CLS law students. We were assigned another church as our polling site, but there were already 3 election protection groups there. Apparently there were so many of us volunteering in Philadelphia that the whole city was already covered. We drove around a few more polling places until we found one that had a single group working there. It was an elementary school in a very nice and almost entirely African-American neighborhood. The city was actually very pretty, lots of stone or red brick houses and big trees. It was a welcome change from Manhattan, that's for sure. We handed out voter's bills of rights to people coming to vote and assisted them if they had minor problems (very few did). The only thing that really went wrong at the poll was that there seemed to be increased police patrolling in the area, and one police car circled the block over a dozen times, ticketing the cars of voters each time. It is illegal for the police to hang out within 100 feet of a polling place unless there is a disturbance as it constitutes voter intimidation. I got pretty pissed off watching the fat, white, stereotypical police officer ticketing the cars of elderly black voters trying to walk with canes up the stairs (a lot of them were really cute, they would take 15 min to get up the flight of 6 stairs, but were determined to get up and vote and didn't want any assistance, they were willing to take their time). I called in a few complaints to our central office about the police harrassment and the officer went away eventually. Whether it was because of my complaints or because he met his quota I don't know. The district attourney came by later and I informed her of the problem. She said that the ticketed people could easily get the tickets thrown out in court and not to worry about it. I worked a 13 hour shift, all outdoors (poll monitors can't come within 10 ft of the poll) so it was a pretty intense day. I did manage to slip off long enough to get a philli cheese steak (which was really good) since there were more than enough of us to cover the site. Other volunteers came to check on us and bring us coffee and food throughout the day, but what we really lacked was news. We had no TV or radio and we wanted to see the election coverage. We made phone calls to friends with TV access and threw around lots of wild speculation. At the end of the day on the bus back we finally started to get the radio coverage. We were exhausted. By the time I got back to Manhattan it was 2AM and I'd gone for 2 days with no sleep, I was running on nerves and caffeine. I got cleaned up and watched the poll numbers come in before going to bed. As I suspected, there won't be a diffinitive outcome for a while. Maybe I should have gone to Ohio instead, looks like they may have needed more help. Oh well, I did what I could. It's in the hands of the vote counters now and I can't say I'm overly optimistic.
