In Defense of Community Organizing

Every four years we hear about voter intimidation, voter caging, voters being erroneously purged for the voter rolls and misinformation campaigns designed to confuse or frighten voters away from the polls. These schemes are almost always targeted at minority voters, likely to vote Democrat, from the controversy in Jeb Bush’s Florida in 2000 to the shenanigans of the Texas Strike Force in Ohio in 2004. And yet John McCain says that ACORN is threatening the very fabric of our Democracy by conducting voter registration drives.

I’m not going to get into the minutia of the overblown ACORN controversy because it’s been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. However, last week on Donnybrook Bill McClelland said that there should be no voter registration drives conducted by anyone because people who are eligible to vote should take it upon themselves to get registered and if they don’t, then maybe they shouldn’t vote at all. I agree, every eligible voter should register and vote. I also think that everyone should wear their seat belt, eat their vegetable and quit smoking, but I also acknowledge that people don’t always do what’s best for them without encouragement.

I’m just going to tell one story. A few weeks ago while volunteering for the Obama Campaign; I knocked on a door at the end of my shift. An older, white man answered the door and I asked if he was registered. He told me he was ineligible to vote because he was a convicted felon. Considering his age I found it hard to believe that this was a recent conviction so I asked if he was still on parole. When he told me he’d be off parole for years and I told he could in fact vote; his eyes lit up. “You mean I can vote in the Presidential Election?!” I told him he could vote in any election. He was ecstatic. This man hadn’t voted since 1972 and no one in all that time had bothered to tell him that he could.  Now, he is a grown man, despite the fact that he happened to be legally blind, I’m sure he could have looked up the current election law in the state and gone to the public library to register himself. However, he hadn’t and who knows when or if he would have if I or someone else hadn’t knocked on his door.

I’m not defending ACORN for the simple fact that I don’t know much about the organization. I’m not even getting all political or partisan about it. All I’m saying is that when I registered this man who hadn’t voted since 1972, who thought he couldn’t vote, I felt like I had done something in the service of Democracy. I felt proud.