We just hosted our first MoveOn.org voter registration party. (You are registered to vote, aren’t you? If not, register register here.) Julie did all the hard work of organizing the party, preparing the munchies, going through MoveOn’s rather overwhelming and confusing instructions to make things simple for the rest of us, and getting the lists of unregistered voters to call. She’s great at the organizational stuff, and that the party was a success is due to her hard work.

We had 10 participants, and each of us called 24-36 people, mainly women in Florida who didn’t vote in the last presidential election. We registered three voters. Yes, only three! Most of the phone numbers we called were disconnected or wrong numbers. We left messages on several answering machines. And when we did get through to people, we often got replies such as:

Click.

“I’m not interested.”

“I don’t believe that my vote counts for anything.”

“I don’t believe that women should be allowed to vote.” [Yes, a woman said that.]

“Please don’t call again.”

“I’m registered. I vote. I always vote!”

Rather incredible, really. So how was it a success, you ask? Well, MoveOn ran out of numbers for us to call. After we went through all the numbers we had, they had no more to offer. Over 15,000 people signed up to participate in today’s event. Probably more actually participated, since we, at least, had 2-3 people participate who hadn’t signed up. And we did manage to register a few voters, and leave messages on answering machines telling folks to visit the MoveOn PAC Web site or their local department of motor vehicles to register. We’ll know for sure what happened when MoveOn reports the results in the next few days, but if we managed to register only 5,000 voters, it could make a difference in the outcome in November. And that’s what we’re really hoping to achieve.

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