GOTV - Get Out The Vote

New York City has the onus of making 2,000,000 phone calls to battleground states by the time the polls close on Tuesday. The New York for Obama has a "New York Last Call" action alert that has been going on since Friday.

Babysitting in the city is rather expensive. So to do my bit, I brought them with me to phonebank at the Teamsters' HQ :

Teamsters Local 237
216 West 14th St.
btwn 7th and 8th Aves
New York, NY 10011
Sun noon-9pm
Mon 10am-9pm
Election Day 9am-9pm

If you are in the 14th Street area, send in your RSVP.

The kids helped with picking up all the callers' paperwork and taking it to "the lady with the computer", so she could process the information on their central database. They also streamed some videos and did some interviews. You can see the fruit of their labor at the culturekitchen channel on Qik.com.

Making my life far easier in digesting the news :

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

Go read the whole thing.

69% of Latinas do not vote. Even though we have the highest pregnancy rates and the fastest growing incidences of AIDS in the United States. 70% African American and Asian American registered voting women also abstain from voting.

Pass on this video clip to every single, Black, Latian, Asian, Native US American woman you know and ask them to pass it on to their family friends.

Faced with the prospect of a McCain presidency that would squash any hope of Universal Health Care and would put on the bench Supreme Court Justices that would bring back reproductive slavery, it is absolutely necessary that each and every minority woman and man go out and vote.

From the EngageHer blog :

In the immortal words of Team America, fuck yeah! This has got to be one of the best "get out the vote" initiatives I've seen in a long time.

Via Digg and Twitter and cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

Wilmer Valderrama, Rosario Dawson, Nick Zano, and Tony Plana (Ugly Betty) star in this dramatic telenovela story about love, betrayal, ...and registering to vote!

This is awesome.

The under-30 crowd not only rocked the vote on Tuesday, but they did so happily in favor of Democrats:

Republican pollster Ed Goeas said young voters could have swayed a number of tight races on Tuesday, noting that of 28 seats Democrats picked up from Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, 22 were won by less than 2 percent of the vote and 18 were won by just 5,000 votes or less.

"The increase in the youth vote did come into play," he said.

Do we have to spell out why Generation Y would have voted Democrat?

A poll by Harvard University's Institute of Politics last week showed that by a three-to-one margin, young Americans said the country was on the "wrong track."

Forty-six percent favored a total troop withdrawal from Iraq within a year, while a third said troops should be withdrawn after the Iraqis take full control.

Future elections could also be at stake. The "Generation Y" of Americans born from 1977 to 1994 -- shaped by the September 11 attacks, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina -- in nine years will make up a third of the electorate.

Feeling it!