Their front doors are decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and spooky ghosts, and sometimes with oil lamps or Rangoli designs from the recent Hindu Festival of Lights. When the door opens to Get Out the Vote (GOTV) canvassers on the last Saturday before Election Day, the smell of Dhal curries and home cooked stews wafts out into the crisp Fall day. Many of Centreville’s houses in the 20120 zip code, on streets named Birchleaf Court or Sequoia Farms Lane, are owned by naturalized citizens.
Rebecca FIsher says she drove here from Utah to help run the GOTV campaign in Virginia. She briefs the volunteers who have driven to Centreville from Arlington, Great Falls, Reston, and McLean to help knock on the doors of voters who have not consistently voted in the past. Fisher says the GOTV campaign is important because analysis of voting trends show many voters do not go to the polls consistently, or often have an absentee ballot they forgot to mail, or don’t know where they are supposed to vote and when.
She hands the script to her volunteers: “Make sure they have a plan to vote,” she says, “and an I.D. — some of them don’t have drivers licences.” Fisher made the decision to come east in September, at the height of the criticism of Hillary Clinton. She told herself she was not going to sit still while Clinton campaigned: she would go where she was needed to make sure voters who were likely to elect Clinton actually got out to vote. One of her colleagues is Brigid Godfrey, a George Washington University student. They are in the garage of Mohammad Lahlou’s house in Centreville, which offered as a staging point for the volunteers. There are about 25 volunteers for a three-hour shift walking around these neighborhoods. There are about 14,000 names on the list they hope to get through before Nov. 8.
One of the volunteers is Mariam Roshini Jacob from Great Falls. She came to the U.S. originally from Kerala, India and is showing a friend from Jordan what an American election campaign looks like while she volunteers to get out the vote. Some of the volunteers are in their 70s, some are in their teens. The doors they knock on are opened by Jean originally from Laos, Carmen from El Salvador, Noor from Pakistan, Roopa from India, Sarabhjit from the Punjab, Hassan from Egypt, and Nga from Vietnam. Almost without exception, they are excited to be going out to vote in an election they view as important, to remind the candidates that they are hardworking, educated, interested, invested Americans. None appear to be taking this election for granted.