Election Night 2002

Not long after I got to her party, Jo Chamberlain began the speaking section of the meeting. She got all of her volunteers to tell everybody a little about the section of the map they had signed up for, and what they had accomplished. As you can see from the maps on the wall with green spots where volunteers had delivered literature, a very large percentage of the district 's homes had been visited by the team. Also, during much of September and October Jo was in the newspaper almost every day somewhere in the district. It was really something. Not only did they do that, but they also sent postcards to everyone that had requested an absentee ballot. She shared a number of fine anecdotes from the campaign trail before turning over the mike to a procession of others.

Guillermo Kuhl thanked the Green Party of Daly City, and especially Tom Dickerman, for visiting every door in the town on his behalf.

After all the people on the ballot that were there had said a few words, Jo asked people to tell some fun stories from the campaign trail. Gena talked about how she had represented Peter Camejo at a junior leadership conference in Berkeley. She had gotten up in front of the crowd and told them to "vote against death", since both Simon and Davis were in favor of the death penalty. Camejo won the election following the debate, and that fact had made the news. I even heard it here in Mountain View.

Aaron Lipke was a volunteer from Chicago that had crawled out of the woodwork to help with the campaign. In introducing him, Jo told the story about the ten voters on the street with a graveyard that they hadn't been able to find for love or money. Aaron had looked at the graveyard, looked at the list, and then wondered "How can there only be ten registered voters in that whole graveyard?" For some reason I managed to forget the story that he told at the microphone, but not that one.

Pat Gray, the woman sitting to the left of Fred and Lois Duperault, didn't get up and make any prepared comments, but there is a rumor going around that she will probably be running for Congress in two years. It seems that somebody has to take on Tom Lantos, who has been far too visible in his support for Bush's war policy for her taste. I heard about it when Peter Camejo explained that after the election we could recycle all those VOTE GREEN NOT GRAY buttons by changing the the NOT into a VOTE.

Mary (the woman to the right of Jo's opponent who won the election) is the kind of volunteer that was always there for Jo. I remember going down to BART to give VOTE JO postcards to early morning commuters, and Mary was already there. Somewhere in the evening she talked about fighting the sign wars along Highway 1, which went through her turf.

Mary Lyle, the woman to her right in the red sweater, organized the precinct walkers that covered San Mateo. She vastly preferred handing out Camejo fliers to the Statewide Slate Newspapers, because she felt the newspapers "lacked focus".

The guy sitting on the floor in the green tie-dyed T shirt is Arlan. His big leadership role was probably organizing the San Mateo County Green Party Booth for the San Mateo County Fair. It turned out fabulously well, wining the "Best Industrial Booth" Award, with a nice plaque and some extra free publicity. The only downside of the experience was that the guy worked so hard that it put him in the hospital for a couple of days with another heart attack.

Most of the people in this picture are students from Burlingame High School. For their 12th grade government class, they were supposed to do ten hours of volunteering for a political campaign. Some of them had tried to help the Republicans, but the Republican Party had told them to go away, so they ended up helping Jo. I'm still surprised by the fact that happened. Political parties that want to last need to bring in young people.

After I left Jo's party I came back down to Mountain View to find out how my favorite candidates for City Council were doing. Bruce Karney hosted a joint party with Matt Neely. Around 11 PM it became fairly evident to everyone who was watching the votes being counted that Matt had won his race and Bruce had lost his. This picture of Matt was taken while he thanked all his volunteers for the hard work that put him on the City Council. I managed to miss Bruce's Speech, if he gave one. I'm sorry to report that I didn't make it to Greg Perry's victory party.