I met Samba last weekend. He was on my list of "infrequent voters" because this is his first election here in the precinct. It's his first election anywhere.
He became a citizen just a few months ago. On Tuesday, he will cast his first vote as an American. How cool is that?
I gave him directions to the polling place and explained what he would find when he got there and how the process works. As it turns out he is, like me, supporting John Kerry, but that's not why it was such a privilege to meet him and to be able to play a small part in his first-ever vote.
It was nice reminder of Will Rogers' definition of the sign of a healthy, free country: "Are people tryin' to get in? Or are they tryin' to get out?"
Another highlight was talking to Bill, who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.
Bill is pretty far to my left politically, and also pretty far to the left of John Kerry and John Edwards. In a system with proportional representation, Bill and I probably wouldn't be in the same party.
But Bill is aware of the arithmetic of our two-party, winner-take-all system. He recognizes that a swing-state vote for Nader translates into support for Bush. He doesn't like this system, but he gets it.
I'm sure Bill would've voted for John Kerry whether or not I had sat to talk with him. I'm glad I did, though, because he needed to say a few things out loud to somebody who was willing to listen and to respect his right to be heard.
So he told me about why he genuinely admires Ralph Nader — and the reasons he listed were good ones. He told me about his frustrations with the Democratic Party and the two-party system. I disagreed with him on some points, and said so, but I wasn't there to debate. I was there to give him a fair hearing, and I did.
The group I'm volunteering with discourages us from spending too much time talking to any one voter. Time is short and we have too many names on our lists, too much work to do. That's a valid point, strategy-wise, but it's a rule I keep breaking.
The project I'm involved with has to do with getting "infrequent voters" out to the polls. One reason I think that a lot of these people aren't always motivated to vote is that the ballot is a simple multiple-choice question and the answer they'd prefer to give is in essay form. They want their voice to be heard, but they have more to say than just "I'm for candidate X." They want a chance to revise and extend their remarks, to qualify what their vote means and what it doesn't. And if the only person they can get to listen is the guy with the clipboard who shows up at their door then, well, it would seem wrong for that guy not to listen.
A dismaying number of eligible American voters do not register, and a dismaying percentage of those registered do not vote. I've been knocking on a lot of doors in my precinct, trying to talk people into getting out to vote. Behind many of those doors, though, were people who needed to talk themselves into voting — they just needed someone to listen.
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