Registering Stories

Yesterday I spent a while at the Obama campaign checking over voter registration forms before the information was entered into the campaign's database. I thought it would be a pretty boring job; all I had to do was review all of the required fields and make sure things were filled in properly. As it turned out, though, sometimes the data told a story.

For instance, a fellow volunteer and I each found a registration form which had the word "human" filled in for race. It's optional to list race, so we have to assume that these forms were filled out by two people registering at the same time who decided to make either a statement or a joke. Then there were the ones with "change of party" checked off at the top and "Democrat" checked off below. Since we're past the primaries, changing party affiliation at this point is most likely a statement of great frustration.

One voter I noticed was born on November 1, 1990. That means he is just making it; if he had been born 5 days later, he would have had to wait another four years to vote for president. Other voters were at the other end of the spectrum; I saw many forms for people born in the 1920s or 1930s who were just registering for the first time. If this is really the first time these people felt compelled to vote, the election is even more monumental than I'd thought before.


P.S.--In retrospect, I realize that the way I was reading these registrations is actually the way social historians read data. Some historians can do really sophisticated analysis from data just like these forms, ranging from immigration forms to census records to account books. It's not the type of history that's ever