Special CA Election May 19

Tomorrow I'll be working at the polls again for the California Special Election. Since Lorenzo had wanted to talk with me about it, and we hadn't gotten a chance yet, I figured I'd just make a post here. So this is my limited understanding of what's going on. Our state legislators were fighting for quite some time about the budget. Despite having a decent majority in the state congress, Democrats were unable to get a decent budget passed because of the 2/3's super majority required to pass a new budget. So essentially the Republican minority were able to water down and shit all over the budget until it became a budget that no one really liked on any side. That budget partially passed, but it was necessary that parts of it needed to be approved by an election, because some of the sources of funding are coming from things that CA residents have voted on for other causes. So if these propositions are rejected, state legislators have to go back and rework the budget into something hopefully less crappy and more helpful. Here's Courage Campaign's progressive voter guide:

One Small Step for Man

So for the first time I went and worked the polls on election day. This picture is of the line at our polling place in the morning. People were already lining up to vote at like 6:30am! At one point there was an hour an a half wait.

Some people treated us like customer service workers with "I will have satisfaction" attitudes. More still were the people who realized that we were all volunteers trying our best to make things go smoothly. We got many thank yous for volunteering from people. One lady said she was going to go get us some cookies that she had baked. Within 10 minutes she was back with some tasty chocolate chip cookies for us. Another woman brought us cokes and bananas and offered to go pick up any food or anything we might want!

Everyone was expecting an after work 5pm rush to polls that never came. People made sure they voted absentee or early. So the last couple hours were a lot more relaxed than the huge rush of the morning. The most memorable moment of that time was when an excited flustered woman came in to drop off her absentee ballot. Her ballot was all crumpled up as was the envelope and we had to tell her she needed to put it in the envelope, seal it, and sign it, as she didn't seem to know what to do with herself. She asked us "you guys didn't hear?" We had all been required to be at the polls with no breaks from 5pm on so we said "no what's going on?" She said "He won virginia! McCain has to win the entire West Coast to even have a chance!" Needless to say we were all happily shocked blinking at each other and smiling ear to ear. When we were cleaning up after the polls closed one of the clerks said "hey guys want to see something?" We said sure and she showed us the screen of her iphone with a picture of Obama and little color coded bar graphs of the electoral votes: Obama 364 McCain 163. That was the happiest a graph had ever made me feel in my life.

And yet it still didn't sink in. I honked my horn with 20 other cars at MLK and University that night and it still hadn't sunk in. I talked with Adam late into the night, called my Mom, and went to sleep. When I finally woke up today it was because a group of children were walking by outside chanting "Obama! Obama! Obama!" It made me wake up with a big smile on my face. I went on with breakfast and the internet. I read on Crooks and Liars that people were standing outside the White House singing "Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye". Then I watched Obama's acceptance speech and was brought to tears several times. We did it. No third term for BushCo. There's a chance now for this country to flourish once again as a whole and not just 1% of it. Now he just needs to be the change we've been talking about for so long. We still have work to do and long roads to travel.