ELECTION DAY UPDATE: SOME UP/SOME DOWN

Watching the results at a downtown Phoenix hotel.

7 A.M. A  wannabe voter called, reaching me at the gym.  I’d helped her register earlier.  Now she needed to know where to vote as her VOTER ID card with her polling location hadn’t arrived.  This was just the start, since most of my day was spent on the phone telling people where to go.  There are lotsa people I’d like to do that for.

SET-UP or VOTER ASSISTANCE?  A  wannabe voter with a medical condition called.  Her doctor had given her medication that made driving inadvisable “in 4 or 5 days.”  It kicked in early, and there she was, still in Maricopa County but 50 miles away on the opposite corner.  And she needed a van to accommodate her power chair.  

Let’s see.  That’s 25 miles to pick her up, 50 miles to deliver her to her polling place, 50 miles back to the pick-up point, and then 25 miles dead-headed back to the office..

My advice, that we pick her up and transport her to a polling location near where she was, and that she cast a provisional ballot.  That was the plan that we agreed upon, only she called back as our dispatcher was trying to find an handicapped-accessable van.   “Never mind.  I’ll take care of it,” she said.

DIVERSION OF RESOURCES? A woman saying she was a regular volunteer called from a donut shop saying that there was a wannabe-voter with yet another major transportation problem that would have us zig-zagging all over BFE.  Oddly enough, I couldn’t find this “regular volunteer” in our list of regular volunteers.  Then the wannabe voter called back to say that she solved her problem.  Hmmm.