High Stakes GOTV Battles on Primary Day

by: Dean Barker

Sat Jan 12, 2008 at 22:30:46 PM EST
Four years ago, I signed up to volunteer for Dean on primary day; by nature not an extrovert, it was a huge step for me, and a testament to how the Vermont Gov could inspire folks to go beyond their comfort zone for the greater good.  Being completely new to political activism, I was both nervous and excited to be standing outside a polling station in the limb-numbing cold weather, checking off names of Dean voters who had just come out so that the campaign could target their GOTV operation.  Sometime early that morning, I was harrassed by a Kerry supporter who told me that what I was doing was illegal, and he took a picture of me and stormed off, vowing to "report me." It was pretty unnerving for me, since I knew next to nothing about the rules other than what I was asked to do, and it wasn't until someone local from the Dean campaign contacted their counsel and told me I had done nothing wrong that I was able to breathe easy again.

Which is a long way of saying that I got depressed reading this:

But the Clinton intervention at Ward 9 in Nashua nonetheless persuaded the moderator to ban the Obama observers. And the disputes, which dragged on for hours and grew quite heated, generally scrambled the Obama efforts to keep track of who was and wasn't voting, said Obama supporter Andrew Edwards, a rookie state representative assigned to observe the polls in Nashua, where Clinton ran up a big margin in her favor. Edwards was confronted by Lasky and by another veteran Democrat, state representative and Nashua Democratic chairwoman Jane Clemons, who he said issued a veiled threat during the dispute that he would face a stiff primary challenge in Nashua if he ran for reelection.

"The effect of it was that it basically disrupted our get out the vote operation," said Edwards. "My effectiveness that day [in checking off names] was less than 50 percent as a result of the people who kept coming in" to protest the observers.

Clemons, whose son Nick Clemons managed Clinton's campaign in the state, said she objected to the Obama observers because she said she had been told by the Nashua City Clerk the day before that such observers would not be allowed and that letting the Obama use them conferred an "unfair advantage." In an interview Friday, the city clerk, Paul Bergeron, said this was not the case, that the discussion before the election had regarded volunteers challenging voters, not those checking names off lists.
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