More than seven hundred people worked to turn out as many Democratic votes as possible in Broward County to try to swing Florida for Kerry. Bonnie Cediel was one of them As a recently retired school administrator, I was able to put some time and attention into this election. It seemed like the most important thing I could do, not only for my country, but also for my baby grandson. The 2000 election was a scandal. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says "Re-defeat Bush" and a T-shirt to match. I marched in San Francisco, and joined a candle light vigil before our illegal incursion into Iraq. I have a whole folder of news articles about the illegal profit reporting practices of Halliburton while Cheney was CEO. (Why isn't he in jail?) I guess I have become the little old lady in tennis shoes from Berkeley! California, of course, was firmly in the Kerry camp, so there was not much for me to do around here. But thanks to the Internet and cell phones, it is now possible for people like me to campaign in other states. Move-On, the web-based activist group, sponsored neighbourhood parties across the country where we used our cell phones to call voters in swing states like Iowa and Ohio to identify potential workers or to make sure prospective Kerry voters were registered. At the Sierra Club's local office, we called members of the nature protection organisation in North Carolina to encourage them to keep up their support for Kerry who is strong on the environment. We gave all the donations we could. Still, as the election neared, my neighbour and I became increasingly frustrated. Everyone we knew here was for Kerry! We had to go to a swing state to campaign. While she followed hundreds of Californians to Nevada, I used my frequent flyer miles to buy a ticket to Broward County, Florida, the most democratic county in that infamous state, and where I was lucky enough to have relatives I could stay with. Before leaving, I signed up as a canvasser with America Coming Together ("the biggest voter mobilisation programme in history"). So there I was, a few days later, on a street on the other side of the country, a street which I hoped could be a crucial source of votes for our candidate. The ACT office sent out 600 paid locals to deliver voting reminders to all homes in minority neighbourhoods. In addition, there were more than 100 of us volunteers from New York, Massachusetts and California. We were organised in teams, and our job was to ring doorbells and talk to pre- selected probable Kerry voters. For the most part, the people who answered their doors seemed happy to see us. There were older couples with New York accents, young families, new citizens of a variety of ethnicities. They had lots of questions: Where should they go to vote? At what time? What should they do if they didn't have a picture ID? And the biggest question of all: what to do if you had requested an absentee ballot and not received it? Somehow, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections had "lost" 60,000 absentee ballots. Many people called to complain, and some of them got replacement ballots. Others who never got their ballots, but were able to get to the polls on election day, were supposed to vote with a provisional ballot. But there was nothing straightforward about exercising the provisional ballot. Forgotten voters had to challenge the election officials at the polling place in order to have their rights respected. Many polls were attended by some of the 10,000 lawyers who had been trained by the Democratic Party to help voters through this process, but it still seemed haphazard. The brother of a friend of mine went to vote on 2 November and was told that they had him marked down as already having voted. Frustrated and confused, he left the polling station without having cast his ballot. Our work distributing doorknob hangers telling people when and where to vote was exhausting. We spent hours in the 85 degree heat hurrying from one pre-selected address to another. Many of the young men and women who were working with me were up all night every night organising materials; some of them had been working on the campaign in that county for months. The urgency of this election weighed on all of our shoulders -- the war in Iraq, women's rights, the environment, civil liberties -- all the wrong choices that Bush had made that Kerry could begin to make right. For a couple of hours on the afternoon of 2 November, the results of the erroneous exit polls lifted that burden -- suddenly, it seemed the threats were gone. And then the real election returns began coming in. How did this happen? In Florida I got a glimpse of the Republican strategy: a pamphlet delivered to people's homes, approved by Bush and Cheney, that was full of half-truths and outright lies trashing Kerry. A constant din on the radio of anti-Kerry spots. Even Democrats were afraid to vote for him. Negative campaigning works wonders on an uneducated electorate. And then, there was also intimidation. As I was out dropping off voting reminders, a man in a car with a bumper sticker that said, "I have a gun and I vote", drove up to me and told me to get out of his neighbourhood. I noticed his National Rifle Association Member's pin on his shirt as he threatened to call the police. "That would be a good idea," I responded, and went on hanging reminders on doors. He sat and watched me for a while and then left. Twenty minutes later my team leader called me and said there was a police car cruising through the neighbourhood, apparently looking for me. When the policeman finally caught up with me, he stopped and parked in front of the building where I was working. I finished my addresses, then smiled and waved to him as I got into my team's van. He never said anything to me. I'd like to think that he recognised that what I was doing was part of our traditional American election process. I guess I was lucky. In another part of Florida, a women's group campaigning for Kerry had their tyres slashed. The next four years are going to be pretty ugly. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. There will be some nasty fights coming up. I will save my frequent flyer miles for protests in Washington, my cell phone minutes for harassing government agencies. Someone suggested that the Democratic "blue states" join Canada, if they would take us. It would be a pretty good deal for them -- both coasts and the area around the Great Lakes. But somehow, we must heal the rift between divergent visions for this country. Any internal healing will come slowly; people who believe that government should not help them pay for a health plan still have a long way to go. However, I think that the mother of all world geography lessons is in order right now. Changes in the world situation might just wake up a few people in our out-of-touch heartland. Few here understand that we are only five per cent of the world's population. Sure, we have money, but the EU has 25 nations and 450 million people. China and India together are eight times the size of the US. China's growing need for oil has helped skyrocket our gasoline prices. We have been sanctioned by the World Trade Organisation. Even Russia has approved the Kyoto Accords. Meanwhile, our president has personally insulted the people of North Korea and their leader. His idea of diplomacy is carry a big stick and forget about talking softly. Many Evangelical Christians in the US believe that it is God's will that Israel take over all of the West Bank, and George Bush owes them for his victory. Is peace in the Middle East possible without the involvement of the US? After ignoring the UN as we did, are we still the indispensable nation? I don't know how we will ever atone for the needless deaths in Iraq. I wonder when the Christians of this nation will remember that killing people is not a Christian value. George Bush says frequently with pride and to great applause, "It's better that the terrorists are killing people in Iraq than killing people here in the US." The cruel irony that we are the cause of the terrorists being in Iraq in the first place never seems to cross his mind. We will fight this battle from within. The young people I worked with in this country know what is needed here. Then we will have to wait and see what other nations do in response.
