Obama + Florida: Day 29 thru 31 - Wishing I were a voter.
Dammit.I'm still waiting for my life to slow down a little bit. I've been working seven days a week, sometimes on jobs like convincing Democrats from door to door to vote early, sometimes on jobs so tedious that I'd kill to see sunlight. That's what happens when you're a volunteer.
I've been working on turning webpages into PDF files, thousands upon thousands of PDF pages, that end up using no more brain power than typing Ctrl-P and Enter. I was so mentally drained afterwards that I was actually happy to look at something more than 15 feet away. But as it turns out it's an absolutely necessary step to getting volunteers out to the right houses and knocking on the right doors. Not all the jobs are so tedious, but all them them are extremely needed to get voters out.
I found out that my voter registration didn't go through. I filled it out before the October 6th deadline, handed it to my organizer and friend, Andrew, and he sent it to the County through the Obama Campaign, whose job is to enfranchise Dems like me. So when I found out that the County has no record of my name, my birthday, or my current address, I could barely believe it. I'm not going to vote in Florida because my registration disappeared. I spoke to others about this and they simply said, "Welcome to Florida."
This is why I'm here, to make a stand. Voting is a right of every citizen and if this happened to me, it could happen to anybody. And it has. I've spoken to people who are not registered to vote anymore though they've voted their whole lives. I've spoken to people who are new registers and can't understand why they're still waiting for processing.
There's going to be another attempt to suppress Democratic votes this year. It may already be happening. Georgia will be targeted. Arizona and Pennsylvania may be too.
I can't vote at all this year. I'm not going to be able to request a vote-by-mail ballot for California, the deadline was 4 days ago. So for all this talk of voting, it's really ironic that I can't do it myself. So please, California. Vote and Volunteer. Because if more people were in my situation, America would be right back where we were in 2000.
A stolen election.
ca.barackobama.com