So I was in Memphis, right? And had been for the previous five days. I wasn't able to commit to any of the training sessions the local chapter of the DNC would've needed me to endure before putting me into the field in any official capacity on Election Day. But, you know, I did what I could, I gave what I could, and I would be able to live with it, albeit a tad regretfully.

So when I got home Sunday night, there was a call of volunteers from MoveOn.org. I jumped on it. In 2000, I was the biggest Gore supporter in my whole apartment. I didn’t want to feel the same way twice.

I showed up after voting, which would've been, oh, between 7:30 and 8, I guess. Two folks, Emmett and Laura, staffed the MoveOn office. Maps were tacked to walls with multi-color pushpins across all the Missouri districts.

"What do the multicolor pushpins mean," I asked?

"It means we bought multi-color pushpins," I learned.

Phones were piled on phones. Cables like miles of silicon spaghetti. People were filing in fairly regularly as we sat in a small circle for an orientation brief. A vat of chili and a pot of crap coffee brewed in the back.

Long story short, Me, a lady from Kansas named Jane, and a dude called Oliver were being tasked to cover the Missouri 20-05, a precinct in the southeast part of the city. They had no ground presence, they had no volunteers, and they had no precinct leader over there.

See, the MoveOn precinct leader of the 20-05 hadn't, they were told, realized they needed her to work on Election Day. She had volunteered elsewhere.

We were crash-briefed, then, on how to be a precinct leader. We were given three lists: a NEED RIDE list of about 20 names of people whom, that’s right, NEEDED RIDES; a POLL LEADERS list of 12 pages worth of new-registers and Kerry-leaners that MoveOn had been contacting and finessing; biggest of all was a stack of every registered voter in the county. They gave us armbands, signs, brochures and buttons and sent us on our way. Once there, we were to report into what was called our Super-Precinct Leader, let ‘em know we were on the ground working

At the poll, it would be our job to ask the voters coming OUT of the polling center if they were one of the folks on our POLL LEADERS list and, if so, we'd cross them off said list and smile and shake hands and thank them for letting MoveOn into their hearts. So as Jane and Oliver started that, I concurrently decided to start calling the NEED RIDE folks (which my S-P L agreed with) and the whole of the POLL LEADERS sheet (which the S-P L didn't quite seem to think was as important as tracking exiting voters, but she was wrong and I did it anyway). So. Jane and Oliver hitting exiting voters, I’m hitting the phone.

The first call was a wrong number.

The second call I left a message.

The third call was a lady and her husband who had already voted, and had no idea why their names were on our list.

Things started to go very, very wrong from there.

Talking to exiting voters did jack shit, honestly. This poor precinct had been bombarded with calls the last few months, so much so that voters were just fed up with the whole thing.

Later, I started to play that tactic-- promising that mine was the last election question they'd have to answer, that there would be no more TV ads, etc. So while the voters still looked and talked to me like I was an asshole, small glimpses of a sad sort of kindness would leak through. I dropped partisanship first thing, too-- nobody wanted to hear it anymore.

Oliver was getting more and more fed up; the fact that our polling place was a church on top of a fucking hill, and it was windy and cold was doing nothing for anyone's mood. I kept talking to both the S-P L and the MoveOn head dude, begging for some kind of coherent direction but they kept feeding me lines, like I was an undecided voter. It was from the What To Do When Your Volunteers Mutiny script. It became real obvious real quick that everyone was following a script.

A girl showed up to help. She got pissed off after about a half-hour and left. Oliver was getting more and more pissed off at how pointless talking to people coming OUT of the polls was. So out went the script.

It was pretty obvious that the former precinct leader who had flaked was, in fact, a massive flake that hadn't done jack shit. The NEED RIDE list had 3 bogus or bad numbers. No one I was talking to on the POLL LEADERS list had any recollection of hearing from ANYONE from MoveOn. In short, there had been no calls, no contact, no canvassing, no MoveOn presence period.

It was as if we'd decided to start canvassing the precinct on the day of the election. Because that's kind of what we did.

I sent Oliver back to MoveOn HQ to get re-tasked somewhere and Jane and I sat in her car, plowing through the POLL LEADERS list. I called maybe 150, Jane about the same. However many filled 6 pages.

We talked to a lot of answering machines. There were a lot of duplicated names, a lot of wrong numbers, some fax machines, some disconnects. And a handful of people. We found one, that's right, one lady looking for a ride. She was 50-some blocks and 4 precincts away from us, but still. We got her taken care of, and we called every fucking number on our list.

Calling took us until 1 in the afternoon, give or take. Our S-P L had no idea where we were and tried to find us for an hour, maybe more. I gave her directions; she left the house without them. We went back and forth until we were done with our calls and I told the S-P L to stay put at the gas station she was calling from—her cell had died, ha ha—and we’d find her. Which we did. She gave us two cold cups of gas station coffee and then went to relieve another precinct leader somewhere, laying a scoonch of a guilt trip on us the whole time, as though her not knowing where we were was our fault.

Then we headed back to MoveOn HQ, because the 20-05 was fucked long before we showed up that morning and all we could do was go back, hit the phones and keep helping, and get people out to the 20-05 after work, people that knew that impenetrable little area and could actually help if people called needing rides.

I had no car, and ended up behind my laptop, printing out driving and contact directions for volunteers heading to their respective precincts. I had an Excel sheet and MapQuest and a precinct list and leader list, and would drop bits from each together. People were coming in right up until about 6:30, a half-hour before the polls closed. At 6, MoveOn turned everyone loose from poll checking and tasked them on canvassing door to door. Shortly after 6:30, when Emmett turned a volunteer away at the door I figured it over and called Kel and she came to pick me up.

•

The first question, the ego question: Did we do any good? I can answer that one now.

I know for a fact that we got one little old lady a ride to and from the poll. So there was one vote. And as Missouri didn't break the way I personally wanted it to, you could theoretically argue that every vote after the 2nd vote for the GOP was useless. I would like to feel like we did good anyway, that we made the process work for one little old lady whom the system, on either side, would've otherwise ignored. A moral or karmic victory at best, perhaps, but as I type this at 2:18 AM on Nov. 3rd, I'll take what I can get.

The second question is: what happened?

That's two answers, really, on a micro- and macro-scale. The first is what went wrong, why, and how to fix these new types of organizations; the second answer is about a larger issue. O Democratic party, why hast thou forsaken us?

I'll try to get to answer 1 by the weekend and answer 2 as soon as I can. There's some research I gotta do first. Stay tuned, Gang of Four.