A day in Allentown

Sadly at age 15 I am not allowed to vote. However, with this election being so important I wanted to contribute somehow to the political process. My mom and I decided to go to swing state Pennsylvania to volunteer as part of an Obama Get Out the Vote effort on election day. We found a group in Tarrytown who went down to Allentown, Pennsylvania every 4 years to campaign. The group of 10 consisted of my mom and I, our town's mayor, my neighbor, and a bunch of passionately liberal older women. I left for Allentown at 7 am and was quite tired. I slept the whole ride, waking up occasionally to the liberal rants of the older ladies mostly about Sarah Palin. Then we arrived at the Allentown. It was a very run down working class area. It was clearly hurt by the economy. However, Obama headquarters in Allentown was thriving.
The headquarters was outside and everywhere I looked I saw people making phone calls for Obama and wearing “Obama ’08” pins. My group was divided up. My mom and I were put with the mayor, his daughter, and one of the passionate old ladies. We were given an assignment to ring doorbells of registered democrats on a list and ask four questions: Have you voted? If they had not, then: Do you plan on voting? If someone did then: Do you know where to vote? And finally: Do you need a ride to the polls? Our first 2 hours were very boring. Everyone was either not home or had already voted. Then, as we were going to lunch, things got interesting.
A man walked up to us saying he was a former felon put wanted to turn his life around and wanted to vote. He was registered and we gave him all of the voting information that he needed. Next, a man walked up asking us if we spoke Spanish. The mayor’s daughter and I attempted to communicate with him. It ended up that he was a homeless man who had been denied being allowed to vote because he didn’t fill out an address on his registration. We drove him to the city hall and the mayor’s daughter waited in line with him to see what would happen.
Then, as we went to lunch, we saw Ralph Nader campaigners. The older lady began to yell at the Nader supporters. They yelled back about how she should open her mind. Then I tried to talk to them more calmly. They started yelling at me because I had an Obama pin on. So I got into an argument with them as well. I said that this election was too important and that Nader is just running as a spoiler. They said that he should have won the election but wasn’t in the debates and that Obama and McCain were not really different. I was very angry at the fact that people felt this with the huge differences between Obama and McCain but I walked away, figuring that there was no convincing them of how I felt.
After that lovely encounter, I campaigned a lot more. After 6 hours of campaigning, I successfully got out 6 people to vote. One person did not even know that the election was for the country, they thought it was just for Pennsylvania. We did not need to give any rides, but informed a bunch of people on where to vote. I had contributed more than I could have even if I was able to vote and felt very good about it. Last night, Allentown went for Obama by 15%, I was very happy with my contribution and of course overjoyed by the Obama victory in the election.