Brian’s Utah Weblog

Earlier I told the story of the massive million dollar failure of Parents For Choice In Education to bankrupt Utah’s schools at the ballot box. Today we look at one aspect of the campaign.

Poll Watching

Every election day hundreds of volunteers head out to watch the polls in Utah. Sometimes they’re looking for voting irregularities but usually they’re just trying to get out the vote.

The way it works is that you make a list of your supporters. Through canvassing door to door or through volunteer phone contact or through sophisticated statistical sampling you determine who is going to vote for your candidate. Then you split the lists by precinct or polling location and send volunteers out to check if your people have voted.

Volunteers start arriving after the morning rush and poll workers turn the pages of the voter list for the precinct while the volunteers check off the people on their list who voted. As long as there are no voters in line poll watchers — properly designated by a state political party chairman — have a right to see the voter list, though they do not have a right to touch the list itself. Only the poll workers can turn the pages of the list for poll watchers.

It takes an hour or three to go through a list, depending on voter activity.

When the lists arrive back at headquarters phone bankers make calls to remind supporters to vote, mentioning that they have been to check the lists in the morning and the voters haven’t been there yet. It’s particularly effective in getting family members of regular voters to vote and persuading marginal voters to get out in the last hours.

Most people who answer a GOTV phone call are happy to get out and vote once they’re asked directly by someone who knows they haven’t done their civic duty yet. A few are upset to be interrupted but they aren’t likely to vote anyway.

The Pirates

The pirates of so-called Parents For Choice In Education are working hard to deny my children and your a quality public education. They want to divert hundreds of millions of public school dollars to the pockets of their billionaire funders. They targeted about a dozen incumbent Utah representatives who are steadfast for our children and against the pirates’ corporate welfare scheme.

I was poll watching for one of the endangered incumbents. At each polling place I visited there were one or two full-time poll watchers for the pirates. They were not checking the voter list and moving on to another precinct but sticking around all day long with runners to carry lists into headquarters.

Apparently the pirates had to pay temporary agency workers to do their poll watching and didn’t trust them to go from place to place or to check off a list. They were simply marking down each voter as he arrived at the polling place. There must have been a team of paid callers to phone up the voters at the other end of the operation, but I didn’t see that of course.

In districts across the state the pirates spent tens of thousands on get-out-the-vote operations traditionally run by volunteers and candidates. It’s a shocking development and a drastic change. But I don’t expect to see this as the wave of the future, since the pirates’ effort was an astounding near-total failure.

Polling Here At Brian’s Utah Weblog

Vote in the new poll in the right-hand column here at Brian’s Utah Weblog. Don’t be afraid of not knowing enough to be sure — just go with your gut.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 4:20 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.