End of Day 2 winding down...phew

Day 2 started out quite leisurely in fact. Coffee, walk the dog, doing a little shopping for things needed at the duplex, lunch. Then, we walked into the Dem office. On the list of things to do today were more of the same from yesterday; namely calling and getting committments from seasoned volunteers for the various roles on Election Day. Needed are Poll checkers (who also need to be certified by the state), Poll Station leads, Runners, Canvassing Captains and Canvassing teams. As someone who has gotten tired of the repeated political phone calls in what, comparatively, is dormant California, I can't imagine how those whose phone rings in Colorado. "Hi, my name is Josh and I am a volunteer for La Plata county for Obama, can I speak to _____? Hi, ____, I know you've probably been called countless times before, but I wanted to only take a few minutes of your time to dicuss some volunteer opportunities for Election Day...." And so on. Maida and I probably made 100 calls each today, and thankfully, your self-worth isn't attached to the number of people who pick up, let alone agree to volunteer some time. Message after message, the idea is to keep the information flowing. After each phone call, we mark the results into the online system, and move on, ultimately marking some people two and three times as we leave them another message, the second or third in two days.

Following calls came more mindless, yet, linear work of scheduling comfirmed volunteers for this Saturday's mock trial (practice, coordinated by the Obama campaign) into the online Vote Builder tracking system, presumably for charts to be built and higher ups within the campaign to track La Plata county's progress toward the various benchmarks set forth.

News of McCain's arrival in Durango on Friday has the city in a whirlwind. It was front page news for the Durango Herald and every volunteer making phone calls today would seem to either mention it or have the call recipient mention it on the other end of the phone line. From perusing the McCain website, it appears that people interested in attending have to RSVP online and then wait in line starting at 3:00pm at the Durango High School. The Obama campaign will be heading up a Early Voter march to City Hall where a group will cast their ballots, timing it to occur at the same time as McCain's speech.

After phone calls and data entry, Maida and I headed out to dinner at the Nepalese restaurant (again, the food's really good) and then home to the duplex where we had to attend a two-hour conference call for poll workers for all of the western slope from 8pm-10pm. While Maida and I can't work in the polling stations (this is limited to registered voters of Colorado), the info provided is impressive in the true ways of the campaign and politics in general. To think it's as easy as a voter walking into their polling station and then their vote being counted at the close of business it to grossly discount the steps that occur in between as numbers are crunched and the resulting data is processed by campaign volunteers and passed on through the network up the later so that resources can be divied up more efficiently and to locations that may have greater need. The pure power of data-based decision making, in real time, will be a thing to watch on the day of November 4. We are in awe.
Meanwhile, on