THIS WEEKEND

We had a great weekend registering PA voters!! We had Paul and Carol Abuto in York PA, Ken Drier and Susan Peterson in New London Township PA, Henry Burden, Mike Arms, Pat Timberg, Ngeri Nnachi, Beverly and Gordon Tozer in Coatesville PA, and Kevin and I in Coatesville this afternoon. That's an awesome effort made by our group! I can't wait to see the final numbers of how many PA people were registered to vote this election season! Thanks again everyone!!

I know of two people from our group that were able to go see the Springsteen concert in Philly on Saturday and heard they had an attendance of 50,000 people! Everyone who went had to register to vote or sign up to volunteer in order to get in. 50,000 some-odd volunteers!! This campaign is doing AMAZING!!

Kevin and I have an interesting story from our Voter Registration effort this afternoon. We were outside of the "Giant" (supermarket) with clip boards registering people to vote. We had some stickers and Obama brochures and I was wearing an Obama shirt, because we weren't told that we had to be bipartisan. We asked tons of people coming in and out of the store, and most people that were already registered actually thanked us for asking. We registered 10 new voters and gave out 5 more applications for their friends or family members at home. We approached people by asking them if they were registered to vote. If they said yes, we said "Great!" If they said no, we said "You can register right now. Today's the deadline and every vote counts!" Most people didn't seem bothered by us. Towards the end of the afternoon, Kevin asked a man if he was registered to vote. He didn't answer the question, but asked "who are you voting for?". Kevin said, "Well I'm personally voting for Obama, but anyone can register to vote here". The man didn't respond and just walked away. A few minutes later he returned with the store manager telling her that we were forcing people to vote for Obama. He told the manager that his sister called him and told him to come to the store because we tried to force her to vote for Obama. Kevin explained that the man was clearly lying and we were registering anyone to vote. We actually did have one woman who said she was a Republican, but registered with us anyway and was very nice (you could tell she was on the fence!!). Anyway, the store manager was actually quite nasty with us telling us to "get rid of" the Obama stickers and brochures (which we had on our clip boards to give to people that wanted them) and said we had to be bipartisan. We explained that we had no problem doing that and weren't told before that we had to be bipartisan, but she continued to be kind of nasty. The man kept saying he wanted her to get rid of us and stood there. We decided not to deal with the harassment (and we had to get ready to come back anyway...) so instead we walked the parking lot asking people that were outside their cars if they were registered. Once we did the whole lot it was time to go, so we really didn't miss much by that little encounter.

We're not surprised that someone did this, but we were annoyed of course. Then we thought about it. The reason he's probably so "angry" with us registering voters is 1: because most of these newly registered voters wouldn't vote Republican, and 2: he's probably upset because he knows his team's LOSING and that's all he could think of to do!

Anyway, we thought it was an interesting story to tell :)

Thanks again for everyone's help. We have phonebanking Tues and Wed 3-9. Tuesday night there is a Debate Watching Party at Timothy's in Newark. They are offering 1/2 price nachos and drink specials! We're going to try to go to that, let us know if you want to come with us! We have a voter registration table on Wed Evening in front of Acme from 4-8 (we're ALLOWED to have Obama Literature, but no signs), and our next meeting is Friday October 10th. We're meeting at the parking lot on the corner of rte 272 and 40 at 6:15, going down to Woody's at 7:15. We'd love to see you!!