Some people from MoveOn.org were outside my polling place offering people cookies if they told them that they voted for Kerry (they were recording all of the Kerry votes, probably in preparation for calling for a recount). Technically, I think that offering people cookies for a Kerry vote counts as buying votes, but when my dad called the Supervisor of Elections office, they weren't terribly concerned. After I went and voted, I told the MoveOn.org folk that what they were doing was not a statistically valid polling mechanism because it's not a valid poll when you offer somebody a cookie if they tell you they voted a certain way. They didn't say anything.
Also outside the polling place were some people handing out the Democratic ballot recommendations, they asked me if I wanted it, I pointed at my Katherine Harris for Congress t-shirt and asked them "look at my shirt, who does it look like I'm voting for?"
Speaking of Katherine Harris, this morning I was out waving signs for her. Street corner sign waving is an interesting study in American politics. You have the ardent supporters driving by screaming their support, you have the people who are supporting the other candidate driving by and yelling things that they obviously think are witty and creative, but which nobody can understand. Katherine Harris made an appearance, and fortunately people in Bradenton aren't as psycho as people in Sarasota and nobody tried to run over her. At one point, in an excercise that was pretty obviously staged, a guy who claimed to live in a nearby house came over with his toddler daughter and had called the police complaining that everyone should be made to leave because the honking traffic was bothering him and his kid. He had a notebook with him and was trying to get people to give him their names and addresses. The police officer told him that we all had a perfect right to be there and that if he didn't like all of the honkingan thought it was disturbing his daughter, he shouldn't have her out there and should go take her home.
Posted by kathryn at Noviembre 2, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBackKathryn, I saw your comment at World Mag Blog and it strikes me that MoveOn is probably trying to gin up some sort of controversy by claiming their "cookie poll" was an actual exit poll and that Kerry votes have been suppressed. How many people, I wonder, would vote for Bush, then say they voted for Kerry to get a free cookie? And when it turns out there aren't as many Kerry votes as the cookie poll indicates, MoveOn screams fraud...
Okay, maybe it's a longshot, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Posted by: Stephen Tilson at Noviembre 2, 2004 11:25 AMYes, that is what I was thinking too. Everybody is trying to set things up for a Florida recount, and that's just another example. I'm just hoping that the election is not even close, so that they don't have any fuel for contesting the election.
Posted by: Kathryn at Noviembre 2, 2004 03:16 PM