November 3 - One day to go. There has been a busload of volunteers from Texas. They came a few days ago to work through Election Day. I am officially the "staging captain" in charge of teams of canvassers to get out the vote. In practice, we don't have a good handle on who is going to show up. The out-of-state volunteers are more reliable about showing up than the local volunteers because the out-of-staters don't have the distractions of daily life, but they may decide on a whim to work in the other office or that they only want to work with friends. Since I can't really pre-organize them for the day, getting them matched up with locals who have cars takes time so everybody is impatient before I get them sent out. I'm exhausted before the last volunteer is out the door.

We have had a couple of problems with volunteers. One "long-term" volunteer drove in from Arizona. Apparently he felt the work was beneath him - he left without a word after about 48 hours. Another was so demanding that she reduced the volunteer coordinator to tears. The volunteer locked herself in her room in a supporter's house at one point. The Los Lunas office warned us that the troublesome volunteer was coming to Belen on Monday. She announced to me that she had worked on the Obama campaign in four states. I later realized that what she meant was that she had been dismissed from three other states. We learned late on Monday that the volunteer had purloined a list of supporters from the office and was calling the supporters to tell the supporters that they shouldn't vote for Obama!

Election Day - We opened the office at 5:00 AM. Everything went pretty well on getting the volunteers out for canvassing. Their task was to go to known Obama supporters and get them to vote. The Obama campaign had many clever features. One of the cleverest was a system to make the process of getting out the vote more efficient once the canvassers returned for lunch at mid-day. Unfortunately, the software failed, so we were reduced to doing manually what the computer was supposed to do. Staffers shouted out names while volunteers sat on the floor marking lists by hand. Canvassers waited impatiently, not understanding what had gone wrong. That was the most exhausting two hours of my life.

By 5:30, it was too dark for the canvassers to work. They trickled in to wait for the first radio reports. We dissassembled the office while we waited. Some of the volunteers went off to the Los Lunas office where there was a television. The people you see partying at "campaign headquarters" on Election Night are not the people who have been working since before dawn, knocking on doors, making telephone calls to voters, and dealing with crises. Those people have crawled to their hotel rooms to watch the results in some peace and quiet.

Now we have a new president elect. There will be tremendous challenges. Let's all help him lead us ahead.