An Election Day Story

Since I have no personal stories from election day, I thought I'd share one from one of my good buddies. Mr. Campbell is a law student in Chicago, is terrible at Wii Baseball, and chugs beer slower than anyone I've ever seen. His story:

A group of us DePaul students went down to Indiana on Election Day as part of a Voter Protection Team for the Democrat Party. The woman who organized the carpooling of us DePaul students is putting together a compilation of our experiences and stories from Election Day, so I typed up the story below and thought that maybe you (and your friends) may enjoy reading it:

In the late morning a woman in her mid 60s with Parkinson's, Vicky, walked into the voting building where I was stationed as a Democrat Watcher in Elkhart, Indiana. Unfortunately the Parkinson's had taken away much of her dexterity and to look at her navigate the voting room (from the table where she showed her ID to her voting booth) you wondered how she was able to make it around without falling. She was offered a hand a few times in walking around but she turned it down every time saying she was fine. Instead, Vicky was using the extender from a vacuum cleaner as a cane.

After Vicky finished voting the Democrat Judge at the precinct asked me and the Republican Watcher if one of us could give Vicky a ride home. I offered her a ride which she rejected, but I insisted so she finally agreed. I assumed she lived over in one of the houses visible through the window just a few hundred yards away, but figured that she deserved to be saved that few hundred yard walk (as well she did) with a little door-to-door service. We get in the car and she starts giving me directions: "Turn left up here ... ok, keep going... Turn right up there... ok, now turn left up here... keep going, it's just a little more." This morning I went to maps.google.com to figure out how far we went: 1.4 miles. Yep, she'd walked 1.4 miles to vote, with Parkinson's, using a vacuum cleaner extender for a cane, and then initially rejected my offer of giving her a ride back home.

On the ride back she told me she'd only ever missed one vote in 43 years: a Primary when she was pregnant and too nauseous to make the trip. After I dropped her off I told her how impressed I was by what she did, and she told me "If you see Obama tell him that Vicky [I forget her last name] made the walk to vote for him."