An Eerie Tale of Two Eries

I am encouraged.

When I left for work this morning, I drove by our usual neighborhood polling place, which has been the voting site for most of our years here. Most of those Election Days, there were modest lines. Today?



I didn't go in this morning to check if anyone was queueing inside, but it's a good sign that most local voters, like us, took care of business earlier.

I am discouraged.

By the reports of violent and pigheaded attempts by Cheeto supporters to attack opponents' campaign events and mount prolonged challenges to approved alternative voting arrangements that even Republican judges are throwing out.

In the end, though, I am more encouraged.

By our home Erie County's record early voting turnout, which we participated in at the beginning of last week and which, by all accounts, went without a hitch other than some occasionally long lines. Around here, I saw no "poll watchers" or armed militias or other signs of attempts to subvert the will of the majority.

But I still have a spleen full of discouragement going back to my experience four Election Days ago, when I visited the other Erie County to assist in enabling voting and preventing voter suppression.

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New York is as in the bag for Biden as you can get, but a battleground lies barely an hour from here. Many reports  indicate that Pennsylvania will be the most significant of the swing states, and Cheeto has produced much mischief, thus far mostly rejected in courts, to limit voter options there before the election and the counting of mail-in ballots cast in the Keystone State  on or before Election Day that do not arrive until after.

Four years ago, there wasn't as much rhetoric or litigation, but there was enough concern on Democrats' part for the party leadership to solicit for "vote protectors" in that and other expected battleground states.  I volunteered to go to Pennsylvania, preferring the relative closeness of its western port city of Erie, after rejecting out of hand other hideous options like Florida. 

Implementation of the volunteer effort was essentially handed off to the Clinton campaign, which did a pretty hideous job of it. As of November 1, the Tuesday before that year's November 8 election, I hadn't been contacted with details on my assignment; I began to suspect it was because I had opted out of Hillary's 20-a-day email begs for money. I finally got word through a voicemail three days before I'd have to go, and a confirming email finally arrived-



This is in the city limits, and turned out to be a mostly minority neighborhood.  This is from my same-day blogging of the event back then:

I was up in time to feed everybody, pack up the car, and head for my two election assignments. First was my own vote, and our nearby polling place. Just after 6 AM, it was packed. There are two precincts that share the church hall, and I was the 29th voter in line when I finally got to the head of the line around 6:30. Our friend Ann, who will be letting Ebony in and out of our house tomorrow, also votes at the church, and she had a similar wait for her line. Then it was just me and Siri finding our way to Erie Pennsylvania for my day of protecting voters.

I'm here. Now all I could use is some voters.

The protection project, and Pennsylvania election law, have two categories of observers. Official poll watchers are allowed in the precinct, and have access to certain things. To be one, you need credentials, which you can only get if you are registered voter in that county. That makes me merely an observer. They [the Democratic party "they"] assign attorneys from out of Pennsylvania to these locations in case lines get long, or trouble breaks out.

I don't think that's going to be a problem. When I got here, there was not a single voter inside the station. I knew to find the Judge of Election- an official and elected office in this state who is in charge of all decisions and decorum. Very nice lady, but I think I off-put her a little just being here. Before long, she was on the phone to somebody who insisted that I do all my observing from outside the station. But she, and all the poll workers, we're very nice about it, and even offered to share their coffee with me anytime I wanted it.

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From later that night, before we Knew:

My final tallies:

-Over 210 miles on the odometer (many of them on detours for lunch and petrol before heading home, then getting lost after Siri tried to send me the wrong way down a one-way street to get back to the 90).

-Ten hours from arrival in to departure from the precinct.

-282 voters passed through Precinct 5, District 6 on my watch.

-Five very nice poll workers, the head Judge among them always being very nice and even graced me with the bling that my own Erie County Board of Elections refuses to pass out:



(Our early voting site did pass them out this time around:)

As I turned in from the day of travel, Pennsylvania had not yet been called, although I did confirm that my precinct went for Hillary before going to bed. It simply wasn't enough; turnout all day in that precinct was sparse, as the day was rainy and cold, and despite seeing a midday parade through the adjoining street by a mostly Black group of school kids on their day off chanting "get out and vote!" to the neighborhood, in my experience and confirmed by the final totals, not enough of the neighbors did. Pennsylvania's Erie County as a whole voted for Cheeto, driven mostly by populace from its outer limits.

I ended my post from that day thus (the references to "theater" and "stay there" being because we had tickets to Rent in that same city the next night):

As the temperature dropped and the rain came down (not on me, but filling a gutter that drip-drip-dripped near me annoying the crap out of me), I made the call to exit roughly ten hours after I arrived. I thanked Judge Ann and her compatriots, secured my voter sticker, got stupid lost (but found the theater we'll be at tomorrow night) and finally got back on the 90 in time to roll in just before our own polls closed.  I missed hitting a deer around Fredonia by maybe 100 feet, making the decision to stay there tomorrow night a wiser one than ever.  We both remain sick with these coughs, but hopefully our spirits will soar by morning.

Spoiler alert: they didn't.

There were already hints from NPR on the drive home- that so-called "blue firewall" states in the Rust Belt were producing lower Democratic turnouts than Obama years, and that unthinkable states were going ever so slightly red, but just enough to deny Hillary the honor that thousands of Rochesterians were predicting that very night at the gravesite of Susan B. Anthony:



In the end, it was microscopic fractions of the electorate- in Michigan, Wisconsin, and, yes, Pennsylvania- that put Cheeto over the top.  In at least two of those cases (Pennsylvania's numbers changed a little, but not much, after this analysis), votes diverted to Green candidate Shill Stein would have flipped those results:

In Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes. Stein got 51,423. In Wisconsin, Trump edged out Clinton by 22,177 votes while Stein received 31,006. [A final tally from Philadelphia] puts the margin between Clinton and Trump in the Keystone State at 46,435. Before these totals came in, Stein already had more than 49,000 votes throughout the commonwealth.

You think your vote doesn't matter? Fewer that 80,000 votes in just those three states produced the horror of the last almost four years, out of more than 300 million people affected by it- and those throwaways to the Windmill Tilting Party more than exceeded those 80,000.

At least this year, the left is largely ignoring the They're Both Just As Bad rhetoric from the Greens.  The non-major party signs I'm seeing are mostly jokes:



I'd be fine replacing a Klan supporter with the Clan;)



That's a local plumber, not the famed ambulance chaser: Flush that idiot out of the White House!

And even I didn't, um, catch this one at first:



Those would be the Bills' third-year quarterback and his most talented receiver.  But today, it's Biden who makes me wanna shout! 

Check back tomorrow if it's turned into a primal scream.