Early Voting in Ohio

DSC_0011, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 20,963
Total voters registered yesterday – 29,445
Miles driven today – 104 so far

4:13 pm – Today marks the first day of early voting in Ohio. From now until election day, anyone who turns up at the county board of elections during business hours can vote or register or both without further ado. This morning, we returned to Wilberforce University and bussed some 60 students to the county office to vote early.

Campaigns, it should be noted, run on the energy of youth. There is no one else who can take the brutal combination of elation, tedium, sleeplessness, anger, joy, and anticipation. I have friends working on campaigns both national and local this election cycle and a sample email I got from one reads as follows:

“Friends,

“I want you to know, that although I have been very AWOL for the past several months, I miss you so much. I don’t want to sound like a stalker, but sometimes I check out your facebook pages just so that I can feel like I’m seeing you from time to time and “keeping up.” It is clearly not the same.

“The next 38 days are probably going to be the most challenging and exhausting of my life. My job never really ends, and my feeling of accountability has become all-encompassing. It takes a toll. My stomach aches sometimes, and when I sit still in the mornings, I fall asleep unless I drink some serious coffee. And I’m drinking some serious coffee. I believe in what I’m doing. So much so that at this stage of the game, I feel an intense sense of guilt when I take time to call or email anyone who is not an Iowan, working in Iowa on the campaign, or just working on the campaign.

“I have not exercised in months. Yes, months. I’ve even stopped crunches every day and only do them sometimes. I think you guys understand that that’s a big deal. Frankly, sometimes I do not shower as much as I should.”

The ‘youth vote’ gets disparaged pretty regularly, and it’s true that we haven’t turned out as much as we maybe should have in the past. But you have to remember that the campaigns themselves wouldn’t exist without the fiendishly devoted young people who act as their shock troops. For every apathetic kid who claims that his vote just doesn’t matter, there is a half-crazed activist fighting against the injustices of the world.

Of course, in politics as in romance, it’s easy to fall into cynicism. You work for a guy for a while and it stops being about issues. You feel a connection. Your candidate understands you. He’s your friend, albeit one you’ve never met. And then he loses and the bottom falls out and everything you worked for seems pointless and foolish. It’s that same old sob story: guy meets candidate, guy falls for candidate, candidate loses, guy ends up broken and alone only to realize that that quirky best friend he’s known since the beginning of the film is the real candidate.

Or… well… the romantic-comedy/election-cycle comparison is not an exact metaphor. I am just saying it’s easy to lose faith in the system when things don’t turn out how you think they should… Think of the non-voters in this election as the cantankerous old hermits who have been used and beaten by the world and will never love again. And then there are the voters. Voting is an affirmation of life. It is a way to have a voice your country’s leadership and through that your country’s future.

And, alright, admittedly, it’s not nearly so stirring to bus someone to the county election center as it is to watch the band geek finally get the girl of his dreams, but if you look for it, there is something touching about a busload of first time voters and the young activists who are needling them on to the polls.

–Nick Brown

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