A first hand view of signature gathering

A first hand account of gathering signatures to get McKinney-Clemente on the ballot in Iowa, as told by one of GPUS’ newest Steering Committee chairs Jill Bussiere of Wisconsin:

We arrived in Iowa City last night and hooked up with Holly Hart and Bill (the man in the suit) at the ped mall. Collecting was pretty good, and all three of us got over 20 signatures each in about an hour and a quarter.

We have had some difficulties today in Iowa – we tried collecting signatures in Davenport this morning in a farmers’ market, but were told we were not allowed. We went downtown where there had been a run, and where they were having a two day street fair. Collecting there was quite good, but after an hour or so we were told that political activity was not allowed. The streets are being rented by an entity called Davenport One, and they made a rule some years ago that political activity is not allowed. This seemed an injustice to us – an abridgment of our First Amendment rights – but perhaps the city signed away such basic rights when they rented the streets out – we are inquiring but so far have no answers.

From there we went to RAGBRAI in LeClaire, just 6 miles away from Davenport – where bikers were coming from across the state. We arrived too late there, and so only gathered a few signatures.

From there we went to a concert in a beautiful Davenport park, where the going was good, and where some elders were playing with remote control boats of all sorts – lots of fun to watch. After eating dinner, we went to downtown Davenport, back to the street festival, making sure we stayed outside of the rented area. There Monte and I got 27 signatures in about 40 minutes.

So, so far, we have collected 193 signatures among the three of us. We hope to get a good amount tomorrow. Although a fair amount of people have said yes, more have said no.

The Iowa Greens raised money for us, a generous amount, which has enabled us to eat well during our time here.

We have tried to keep our spirits up. We had high expectations of how many signatures we could get, and it has been hard going. But it does feel good to be working to participate in our election system, however flawed, and to support our brother and sister Iowa Greens.

Signing out,
Jill Bussiere, Ahnapee River Green Party

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Grassroots Democracy, State Party News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. Richard Kuszmar says:
    July 28, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Now that is commitment. Approaching strangers is not easy in our society. Thank you all for putting yourselves on the line.

  2. Ronald Hardy says:
    July 28, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    We also need more people to either go to neighboring states or donate to the ballot access committee to help fund some ballot drives. States are scrambling right now. Check out:

    http://www.gp.org/committees/ballot

    For upcoming state deadlines and contacts for helping those states.

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