New Hampshire Moves On

Massachusetts liberals descended on New Hampshire this election day to help defeat court-appointed President Bush, and elect their own Senator Kerry.  Some had arrived or commuted to New Hampshire to interview potential Kerry voters in the day or days before.  A few paid co-ordinators had been working there for months.

The strategy was simple and built around the many volunteers MoveOn has available for short-term involvement but its limited resources for an extended field effort.  First, identify people who aren't regular voters and who are fairly likely to support Kerry, meaning registered Democrats and Independents.  Second, ask them if they support Kerry.  Third, make sure that those who say they support Kerry vote.

Based on this reporters anecdotal impressions participating in this get-out-the-vote effort in a conservative, rural area about a half hour from Manchester, New Hampshire's allowance of same-day registration, its good voting equipment, and its well-run polling stations proved even more important for Kerry's victory in this state. Though most volunteers seemed to come from Massachusetts, some were New Hampshire natives and others came from Vermont, Rhode Island, or elsewhere in New England.

At 10 p.m. on November 1, the eve of the election, a flux of nine to twelve people in an eight by twelve foot room arranged printouts and notes on every available piece of wall, consulted internet-connected laptops, fielded phone calls, and ate pizza at the MoveOn PAC basement headquarters in Manchester.

Matt Wilson, hired this summer to run MoveOn PAC's operations in New Hampshire and Maine, told co-ordinators and volunteers the sum of their work as of that night: 13,993 Kerry "contacts" identified, over two percent of the eligible voters.  "But this means nothing if these people don't show up to vote."

This reporter canvassed that day, Monday November 1, in Goffstown with a dozen other volunteers, trying to catch people on this "unlikely voter" list while at home during the day, then continuing until 9 p.m. at night with phone calls.  Most weren't home.  Some, given the campaigns' focus on New Hampshire, might have been hiding under the bed with the lights off.  One claimed the asked-for residents didn't live at that house, despite the evidence to the contrary of the name on the mailbox.

Most of these potential voters were surprisingly polite to yet another set of people interested in their political opinion.  Some didn't want to say who they wanted to vote for.  Others tersely said Bush.  A few opened up with relief when they identified us as Kerry supporters.  Therefore the "refusals" may have been paranoid Kerry backers, but in New Hampshire, even in the Republican towns of Goffstown and Weare, Republicans seemed on the defensive.  Even from those who did not know which side their interviewers supported, the word "Bush" usually came out as a slightly hesitent, even embarrassed, statement of defiance.  Then, of course, 16 hours before polls opened, many people said they would vote, but were still undecided.  Despite instructions not to, just about every MoveOn volunteer spent some time talking about the issues with one of these undecideds, and many felt afterwards that such conversations were their biggest hope of having gotten another Kerry vote.

The day of the election, this reporter ended up in Weare, a more rural town with an even smaller and reportedly more Republican population.  Usually volunteers who work both before and on election day stay in the same town they canvass, but this reporter ended up spotting for the co-ordinator of both towns in the morning at the one polling place in Weare, the town high school.  A long line formed in the voting-booth-filled gymnasium as residents waited for the polls to open.

A table across from the voter check-in table, and six feet away, was reserved for challenging voters as ineligible, not for observers, the moderator said, though MoveOn volunteers could stay if there was room.  One could not hear who was coming in to vote from the table in any case.  The Democractic National Committee challenger, who actually just wanted to observe who voted so the party could mobilize Democrats who hadn't, eventually won the right to stand by the clerks checking voters off the town list and distributing ballots.  The law required that challengers be allowed to see and hear voters check in.  There was no Republican Party presence at the polling place in Weare.

At the suggestion of the only MoveOn volunteer to arrive yet, she and this reporter went outside and asked for people's names after they voted, to cross them off MoveOn's list if they were there.  As other volunteers arrived, some stood outside in the cold, then the rain and cold, and asked voters for their names.  Others sat at a folding table outside or in a car and checked these names against the "unlikely voters" list, a very time-consuming process.  Still more volunteers called or even visited Kerry supporters and uncategorized voters who hadn't been seen yet, asking them if they would vote and when, and offering rides to Kerry people.  Everyone switched off jobs several times throughout the day, and many volunteers could only be there part of the day.  Some wanted to get back to Massachusetts to vote.

For a few hours before five o'clock four people sat in the car and made a final push to update the list of people to get to vote.  Two people each took half the alphabet and updated the master list from one person giving the names of people who had voted and another person giving the results of the telephone calls.  Then volunteers made the final calls and the final visits to get to the polling place the remaining 45 people identified - from earlier canvassing or calls that day - as Kerry supporters.

Meanwhile, inside, people registering to vote filled an entire side of the auditorium, all younger than the general population.  The election workers said some 600 people registered and voted that day, and at least 4,400 people voted in all.Even with this there were never any long lines after the opening rush, though the polling place did steady business.  School was closed for the day and many people took their children into the voting booths with them.

It's really impossible to tell if the MoveOn operation in Weare got dozens of Kerry supporters to vote or none— probably a handful, but multiplied   What is clear is that New Hampshire – Weare used optical scanning to count paper ballots, the least fallible of all automated systems – New Hampshire, unlike a number of other critical states, knows how to run an election.  If the rest of the United States can't learn from Venezuela, can it learn from New England?