if you know me, you know that moveon.org & I probably agree on nearly nothing... however:

YOU GUYS ROCKED last night in Clintonville with your upbeat / positive / kind /caring support of the voters who were stuck for hours outside in the rain. Umbrellas, ponchos, coffee, snacks, and sing-along-songs. I was truly impressed both by your dedication and even more, your actions. You were a bright spot in a long, dreary, and tense day.

Thanks!

Thanks, G-dubs, for the kind words for the Moveon staff (but please note, that was the League of Pissed Off Voters singing all the folk songs).

If I may, I'd like to share my story of Election Day, down at Medary School:

We arrived at the polling place at approximately 6am, and a line had already formed. At this point, it took you just about 45 minutes to an hour to vote. The line pretty much grew throughout the rest of the day, with no let-up.

The kicker:

Our district, unbeknownst to most, was split into 2 wards, and there were 2 lines, the "A" line (average wait = 5 hours) was in front of the school, and the "C" line (average wait = 4 hours) was in back. Most every voter had no idea there were 2 wards, much less 2 lines. What was the polling place's fix for this? Approximately every hour and a half, a judge would come out and yell that people needed to be in their correct lines. How were people to know what ward they were in? By the small map posted *inside* the polling place. We, the "moveon" people, took upon ourselves to figure out how the wards split geographically, and then did the best we could to direct people to their correct lines (no easy feat, considering the Republican Poll judge that was constantly battling us, even as we stayed well beyond the 100 feet limit.) Needless to say, we could not reach everybody, but we did our best.

Lest I forget to mention, if someone happened to stand in the wrong line for 4 or 5 hours, and then finally made it up to the desk and were told they were in error, they had to go back outside to the end of the other line. You just read that correctly.

This fact, coupled with the (seriously, no exaggeration) 4 and 5 our wait times, made for a sickeningly high rate of attrition, as so very many people simply gave up and went home, frustrated and angry.

We did everything we could to keep people there, handing out rain ponchos, umbrellas, snacks, and water, but I'm sure we lost, at a bare minimum, *at least* 10% of the voters who actually took the time to come out to vote. If I make a rough extrapolation of numbers from this, assuming this sort of attrition occured in the other democrat stronghold counties, I think Kerry may have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 votes. Granted, there were probably a number of Bush votes lost too, but any way you slice it, it's really just a goddamn shame.