Election Day in Akron, Ohio

Five AM, November 4, 2008: The alarm goes off and I lie with the covers pulled over my head, trying to wring a few more moments of sleep out of the 45 minutes before I'm scheduled to show up at the polls. Suddenly, my cell phone rings, startling me out of bed. Cynthia's (my friend and co-volunteer) phone is also ringing somewhere. It's John Kerry with a motivational wake-up call:

"Good morning, legal observers! I lost Ohio in 2004 because there were no lawyers at the polls making sure everyone got to vote. This is no time to sleep. Get up, get out of bed and get to the polls! You can sleep in tomorrow, after we've won the election."

Despite the hour, I have to laugh. The Obama campaign has thought of everything.

It's pitch-dark and cold as I pull up to my assigned polling place at a church in the working class, primarily African-American neighborhood of northwest Akron. Polls are scheduled to open at 6:30 AM, but by the time I arrive at 5:45 AM there's already a line of 150+ enthusiastic voters, all there to be sure they play their part in history on November 4, 2008. Men, women; young and old; parents with their children. Everyone full of hope and optimism. It is a sight I will never forget.

So what is a California lawyer doing at an Akron polling place, anyway? As John Kerry reminded us in his wake-up call, Ohio was plagued by voting irregularities during the 2004 presidential election. The Democrats are determined to avoid these problems in 2008. To do this, the Obama campaign first pinpointed the places throughout the state where voting problems could be expected to arise. It then assigned a team of lawyers and "get out the vote" (GOTV) operatives to each place. At our polling place, we have six team members: one out-of-state lawyer (me), two Ohio lawyers (Julie and Montrella), and three GOTV operatives (Tona, Kevin and Paul). Each team member has a specific role to play, depending on whether they are stationed inside or outside of the polls. All of the GOTV ops and the outside legal observer are stationed outside the church, 100 feet from the polling place (more on this later). The "inside legal observers" are inside the church.

Six people on-site sounds like a lot, but there is plenty to do during the day. The GOTV ops have a multi-disciplinary job: passing out campaign literature for the Democratic slate, answering questions about Obama, keeping up spirits on the line, doing whatever to get people to the polls (including transportation and food!), keeping in touch with Obama HQ to report in problems and get intelligence about the rest of the city and state. The legal observer's job is more specific: to ensure that everyone who is legally entitled to vote can do so. This includes making sure that voters are in the right place, have the right ID, understand how to fill in the ballot, are not intimidated by the process etc. – a combination of problem-solving (legal and otherwise) and voter education. However, under Ohio law, only Ohio registered voters can go inside the polling place itself. So the inside observers are charged with watching the actual voting process, bringing any issues to the attention of the poll judges, and lodgingchallenges if necessary. The outside observer (me) is there to catch problems before they get to the polling booth, serve as a resource to the GOTV team, and work with the campaign's central legal staff on any issues raised by the insiders.

In addition to all of this, we're required to phone in reports about numbers of voters throughout the day: GOTV sends one set of numbers (including numbers that identify the actual voters) to its boiler-room, and legal sends another set of numbers to its boiler room. All of this data enables HQ to figure out how to reallocate its GOTV resources during the day to get the largest number of voters to the polls.

As the sun rises (it eventually hits 70 degrees – unheard of in Ohio in November!) and the voting gets under way, our team members quickly learn a couple of important things. First, we can't assume that the poll judges are doing their jobs correctly. One of our three judges consistently misinterprets the ID requirements for voting. Ohio law states that a registered voter who shows up where s/he is registered can present any of a number of forms of ID. An unexpired Ohio driver's license is good ID, even if the address on the license is different than the registration address. Our poll judge rejects at least four voters based on a "bad address" and tries to send them home to bring in something else (like a utility bill). She also rejects other statutorily valid forms of identification (for example, an official bill from Ohio State university showing an address).

This is a big problem. A voter who is sent home to get another form of ID may never make it back to the polls. And a voter who insists on voting with a form of ID that the poll judge rejects will end up casting a "provisional ballot" rather than a regular ballot. Provisional ballots are the bane of elections: in Ohio, they aren't counted until 10 days after the election (the Secretary of State needs that much time to verify that the voter was actually entitled to vote). In all but the tightest races, the practical reality is that a vote made on a provisional ballot will never count.

Once we see this becoming a trend, our team develops a strategy. Obviously, the inside observers should be catching the mistakes as they happen – but there are so many voters passing through that inevitably some fall through the cracks. So, as each person exits the polls, a member of the GOTV team catches them and asks "did you get to vote?" If they say yes, the team offers them a very cool, very historic Obama sticker (and if they take it, more goodies --- food, a ride home, stickers for their kids. . . etc.) If they say no, and they are a Democrat, they immediately get sent to me. I work through the problem and either take them back inside to vote right away (I can go to the edge of the polls and signal my insiders, I just can't walk in the room) or arrange for them to get what they need and come back later.

**By the way, I later discover that this issue – IDs and provisional voting –is not unique to our polling place. During the day the legal observers receive several text messages from HQ alerting us to the problem, and we also hear about it on an afternoon conference call. Old habits die hard among the Ohio poll judges, who got away with these types of shenanigans in the
past unchallenged.

The process is bi-partisan, not non-partisan. Until today, I hadn't really thought much about the partisan nature of the process. After all, isn't voter protection about protecting all voters? But it quickly becomes clear that in the context of a political campaign, especially one as hard-fought as this one, the answer is: not so much. Although I'm not practicing law per se(I'm not licensed in Ohio), my work as a legal observer for the Obama team is similar to what I always do as a lawyer: I am representing a client to the best of my ability; in this case my client is any/all Ohio Democratic voters. The other side needs to get its own lawyers. If the party doesn't provide any lawyers -- or if the ones they provide are not trained as thoroughly as we are -- that's the Republican voter's problem, not ours.

So at our polling place, the Democrats have a six-member team (including three lawyers); the Republicans have Monica, an untrained, non-lawyer inside observer. In the beginning she seems barely engaged, reading the paper, which is fine with us. As the day goes on, however, Monica gets cranky about our Obamaphilia (and who can blame her: when all is said and done, our precinct will have cast 688 votes for Obama, 31 for McCain). The Obama GOTV team is clearly much too cheerful for her, and the Obama lawyers are making too many successful challenges to provisional ballots. She comes outside to glare at us from a safe distance every half hour or so, pacing up and down the driveway and making angry calls on her cell.

The rule in Ohio is that no electioneering can go on within 100 feet of the polls. To make sure there's no trouble, the poll workers pace off the 100 feet before polls open in the morning and plant American flags at the boundary. The campaign workers have to stay behind the line, or risk being removed from the polling place by the Board of Elections. A couple of times during the morning, a poll worker comes out to tell us that they are "getting complaints" (from Monica, obviously) that we are too close to the line. There are also complaints that we should be 100 feet from every door in the church (which would put us across the street), not just from the poll entrance. We thank her politely and assure her we are behind the line they have established for us. And it's true. Our line manager Tona -- a Harvard Law student with boundless energy (and with a hardcore Ohio Demo resume going back into her teens) -- and her HLS classmate Kevin make sure each person walks in with a Democratic sample ballot, and walks out with Obama swag. Paul, a battle-hardened local organizer, arranges rides and walks little old ladies to their cars. We've got music, food and conversation for any Obama supporter who wants to drop-in. It's a party, but it's all taking place behind the flags.

Around mid-day, when the initial rush of (Democratic) voters has died down, Monica (and one of the Republican poll workers) gets serious about making things harder for us. Soon after a spate of frantic phone calls, a big, unsmiling, dour-looking guy in a black business suit parks his car in the lot, disappears into the polling place, and then returns to eyeball the flag placement. We're on the McCain campaign's radar. Shortly thereafter a bi-partisan pair of representatives from the Board of Elections (one Republican, one Democrat) appear with a tape measure. I sneak into the church and lurk in the hall to hear the officials give their verdict to the poll workers: the line is good! The Republican elector tells his colleagues that they should take notes and file a complaint after the election if they want all doors of the church treated as poll entrances next year. We try not to look smug as the Democratic elector wishes us a good day on the way out.

**By the way, I check in with my friend Cynthia during the day, and she says the suit-guy also came by her polling place to see if there was anything he could complain about. No luck there either.

But where are all the people? The day wears on, but after the morning rush we see fewer and fewer voters. The word had been that lines would be long and difficult all day but by 3 pm, we're getting worried. Everyone gets on the phone to HQ and friends around town. We trade text messages and emails. Only a few precincts report seeing long lines.

On our afternoon conference call, the organizers tell us to get ready for an onslaught around 4:30 – 5pm, when people start getting out of work. But it never happens. By 6:30 pm, when a killer-cute (and noisy! junior high band and drill team sets up across the street to entertain the (nonexistent) crowd, we're giving away entire sheets of keepsake Obama stickers to the few voters who trickle in. We'll learn later that the early-voting campaign was so successful that turn-out in our precinct was in fact huge: it just didn't take place at the polls on election day.

The last -- and almost best – moment of the day. Polls close at 7:30 pm. It's as dark and cold as it was at 5:45 am, but now we're all tired to boot. There's no one in line and after standing for almost 13 hours we're dying to get to the campaign party, have a drink and watch the returns.

At 7:25, an elegant, elderly black woman in a huge fur coat (Mrs. X) pulls up to the front door and walks into the polling place. Ten minutes later she stomps out, very angry. "Did you get to vote?" asks Kevin. "No, I did not!" she snaps. "My children and grandchildren are going to be so angry and I will NEVER bother to vote again." She heads off to her car in a huff.

The Ohio law is that anyone who is in line to vote at 7:30 must be allowed to vote. It turns out that Mrs. X was in the polling room at 7:29 pm but went to the wrong ward table. By the time she was directed to the correct table, it was 7:30 pm and they had already turned off the voting machine. The poll judge said she was too late to vote. Tough luck.

This is clearly a mistake. Kevin and Tona race out to the car to stop Mrs. X from leaving, while I go inside and signal Julie. Julie, exhausted after the long day, says the machines are off and there's nothing she can do at this point but file an incident report. I disagree – the law says they must let Mrs. X vote, and she can do so on a paper ballot. Julie goes back in to argue with the judge. There's a huge screaming match between the presiding judge and the poll judge about what to do. Mrs. X, standing in the hall, throws up her hands and stalks back out to her car. I follow her, take her arm, and tell her that her vote is too important to waste. We will make sure she gets to vote in this historic election. A minute later Kevin comes out and says they've agreed to let her vote on a paper ballot. A sigh of relief as Mrs. X finally heads to a booth with her ballot in hand.

But the fight isn't over. The presiding judge is saying that the ballot will be provisional because the votes have already been sealed. Again, we know that's not right, but we can't convince the presiding judge. We also can't get hold of anyone in our legal boiler room – the lines are jammed. The judge calls the Board of Elections and they say they'll defer to his judgment. Mrs. X is beside herself. The team caucuses. It's already 8 pm. Is there anything else we can do?

It turns out that Tona, our rising political star, has one more arrow in her quiver. She calls a local party honcho and gets the cell phone number of the senior Democratic representative on the the Summit County Board of Elections, Wayne Jones. Miraculously, we reach Mr. Jones immediately and explain the problem in detail. He agrees with our analysis. Five minutes later the Chairman of the Board has called the presiding judge and directed him to place the ballot in a special envelope. It will be counted tonight with all the other votes.

Mrs. X is teary-eyed as we escort her out. She asks to have her picture taken with the team. She asks for all of our names. She tells us she will tell this story to her children and grandchildren. She says she will never forget us, and how we made sure she was able to cast a vote in the most important election of her lifetime. The feeling is mutual.

It's 9 pm when we finally leave the polls. The long day is over, and an hour later Cynthia and I are drinking martinis in a club in downtown Akron with hundreds of other campaign workers. Big screen TVs ring the gigantic room, and above our heads the electoral map slowly but surely gets bluer. Then the room erupts with the announcement that Obama has taken Ohio. At 11 pm, the balloons drop. Everyone screams and hugs the stranger next to them. President-elect Obama appears on screen and our hearts (and voices!) lift. Can the good guys actually win? Yes, we can.

And at 11:54 pm, my cell phone vibrates. I have a new text message from the most successful community organizer in the world:

"We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion to this campaign. All of this happened because of you. Thanks, Barack."