Friends don't let friends not vote

Those who didn't vote before 5 p.m. yesterday were treated to yet another special message on their cell phones.

When lines at the polls wound down yesterday evening, Penn Leads the Vote hosted a "war room," a tactic often employed by campaigns to reach voters, in an effort to turn out students who had not yet voted.

As poll watchers provided the names of students who had not yet visited the polls, PLTV brought together "well connected" people on campus to contact them, said PLTV executive board member and College senior AJ Schiera.

If any one of the students PLTV had assembled in the war room had the contact information of a student who hadn't voted yet, they would get in touch with the student and encourage them to do so.

The operation hit some bumps along the way - some poll watchers had difficulty updating the list of students who hadn't voted yet.

Schiera explained that if the elections judges at a particular station enforced rules more strictly, poll watchers had to wait until nobody was in line to vote to collect names.

For this reason, the group focused efforts on those divisions whose reporting was most accurate, like the 18th division, which voted at Steinberg-Dietrich Hall.

Although the majority of people called said they had already voted, PLTV reached a few students who had not.

Engineering sophomore Amanda King, for example, was told she wasn't registered in Harrison College House when she went to the polls earlier in the day, so she left without voting.

It wasn't until College senior Lauren Talmen recommended that she cast a provisional ballot that she returned to the poll, where she discovered that the poll worker had made an error.

Even when PLTV had an accurate list, war room participants were limited by the people they knew. By the end, their networks had been exhausted, Schiera said.

Talmen said she wished that the group had more phone numbers.

As a group of 20 to 30 people, they could reach only so many people, added College sophomore Carly Levitz, who was in the war room.

Many calls also went unanswered.

"Two-thirds of the people I called I left voice mails for," said College senior Dorna Mohaghegh, adding that she wasn't sure how successful she was.

And though Schiera said it was unclear whether the war room convinced a significant number of students to vote, several participants said they thought that the event was a success.

"Everyone called or e-mailed at least 15 people," Levitz said.

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