Voting Gone Wrong- A Repost from my Personal Blog

I wrote this for my personal blog at wordpress, but got permission to share it here on the Patch....

I actually started blogging about my day earlier on, before things turned ugly. I was feeling so upbeat about what I was doing and how I was going to HELP. Many hours later, I am feeling quite discouraged and down right outraged at the nonsense that went on (and is likely still going on).

A little background…. I work in McKeesport. I got an email last week from a good friend of mine, looking for a volunteer to help with emergency absentee ballots from McKeesport Hospital. It would involve two trips to Pittsburgh. First, volunteers would help the patients fill out forms that would allow them to get emergency absentee ballots. My job would be to go to the hospital, pick up those forms, drive the into Pittsburgh and pass them off to a ‘runner.’ His job would be to take them in to the judge, get them certified, take them to the election office and have ballots printed for each person. Then he would bring those back to me, I would take them back to the hospital. The volunteers would take the ballots to the patients and bring them back to me so I could drive them back down to Pittsburgh where they would finallly be counted.

As much as I hate to drive (I really hate to drive), I still was up for the challenge! My boss was okay with it, even supportive, and so I agreed to the task.

This morning at about 8:45am, the volunteer at McKeesport called to say their forms were ready. She explained where I was to pick them up, and then asked if I would be willing to ‘swing by’ the new UPMC hospital in Monroeville to collect their forms. I said, “Sure!” and was off! I picked up the McKeesport forms and then made my way to Monroeville.

UPMC East, as the Monroeville hospital is called, is a much larger hospital, so they were not quite ready for me when I got there at 9:30. I ended up getting their forms at 11:30 and then set off for Pittsburgh. I called my ‘runner’ to let him know I was on my way. I was so pumped and excited to be helping! (I should mention that I did manage to get quite a bit of my actual job’s work done while I was waiting.)

I got to the meeting point and passed off the papers. He said, “It should take about 30 minutes for me to get these approved and then the ballots printed.” I said fine and hunkered down to wait. ….   and wait….

and wait….

and wait…

two hours later, I got a text… it said, “It is ugly. Nothing has happened Lots of arguments by attorneys and more to come. No emergency ballots have been authorized yet.”

oh jeez. I’d like to also mention that at this point, I really had to pee and I was starving. But I digress…

at 3:04, he called to say that REPUBLICAN lawyers were doing their darndest to prevent the patients from being allowed to vote. They picked every single application apart, line by line.

Finally, at almost 4pm, he texted to say that the judge had finally signed off on the forms and that he would be getting the ballots to me shortly. When he got to my car, he told me about the chaos that had gone on. There were dozens of lawyers, fighting to prevent the emergency ballots from being approved. He handed me the 24 ballots and said I was the first to actualy get approved ones!

Side note, he said the only reason the lawyers finally relented was after demanding that the forms be copied, in triplicate, so that they can contest them. Yeah, great.

So, at 4:30pm, I joined the rest of the world on the parkway to get back to UPMC East. I got their ballots delivered by 5:30 and the rest to McKeesport by 6. Whew!

The rest is much less dramatic… the volunteer at McKeesport brought me those ballots, then I went back to UPMC East to get theirs. I dropped them all back off to the same runner. That’s when he told me that the judge had just approved for that office to stay open two hours later to make sure those patients’ votes got counted!!!! And yes, there were still lawyers fighting it. I finally got home just before 8pm. Whew.

So it boils down to this… the man who organized all these volunteers like me works for the Disability Network of PA. He had people picking up ballots from all the hospitals in the area. His organization is non-partisan. No one knew who was going to need an emergency ballot today. I have no idea who those patients voted for.

What the heck were those lawyers fighting for??? Why were they so determined to keep those people from voting? And finally, who paid all those lawyers to fight those ballots???

I am overjoyed to know that I had a part in helping over 300 people get their votes in today. That is simply lovely to me. But I am disgusted by the ugliness. I am outraged that people were PAID to prevent votes from counting.

This was intentional. This was planned. Those lawyers were there and waiting to fight these ballots.

That is wrong.