723: Squeaker
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. From WBEZChicago, This American Life, I'm on a glass. Raise your hand if you are in Georgia, ready to start curing ballots and fight for every vote. 1 p.m. Wednesday, the day after the election, Democrat volunteer Kim Hood read the training on Zoom for 500 other Democrat volunteers who are going to go out and cure ballots in Georgia. "Cure" means striking down voters whose mail-in ballots had a problem with a signature or whatever, and they've been rejected for their own count. Curing is the word they use for fixing the ballots. In other words, you hear a lot, rescuing. All eyes in this country are on Georgia right now. Everybody should take it off, get rid of that excess energy and all those nerves we're about to challenge. Normally this is a super polished training, but I have not been to sleep. You can see how they could feel like all of this could come down to them. In Georgia, it was so close, so close, all week between the president and Joe Biden. Out of nearly 5 million votes cast, the times the candidates were just 1,100 votes apart. And the trainers explained to the group that there are over 5,000 votes out there that they can cure mail-in ballots and provisional ballots. So after the training, people found out. Get on phones, knock on doors. Hi, here's Trevor of home. Trevor's a college, the woman says. It's Wednesday night in the Atlanta suburbs. Marla Curid and his volunteers stopped by to find Trevor. Okay, we came up on a rejected absentee ballot list, and so we're just tracking down and seeing if we were able to resolve their- So it's not counted? The woman at the door says. Well, it's not over yet. She has a Euphritian fix to cure his ballot. Marla gives her a packet of materials and explains it. He basically just has to sign an affidavit and photograph that and his photo ID and email them into the county. Back in the car, Marla describes how she ended up deciding to volunteer for this. After seeing President Trump win so many voters, state after state, just the night before, an election night. You know, a lot of the women of color, African-American women, like myself, had a lot of anger to express this morning. Even when we realized, we're like, Biden's going to pull this out. We believed this, but my God, it shouldn't have been this close. And what does that say? And there's a lot of anger to get out about that, and a lot of the women who are white allies also. You know, we were just in a heart to realize we never thought it would be this close. By the time, you know, noon and 1 p.m. came around, it's like, okay, we'll come back to that later. We've got to get these votes.
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