the two days ago we (America Votes Pittsburgh) had a thought. one of our SEIU Hero canvassers had just been stopped by the police. what if we were thrown out by the cops from a large area on election day. no good right. so we lept into action.
we called our lawyers who work with the ACLU and they assured us it was completely within our rights to do political canvassing with no hoops to jump through. so we called up Clean Water Action because we knew they had runins in the past with the cops, with some people being arrested. they gave us a list of the dirty dozen of townships they have had problems in the past.
under the advice of the ACLU we called them and documented what they told us their regulations were in regard to canvassing. we narrowed in on two, Monroeville and Mount Lebanon. they tried to tell us we needed to bring everybody in for background checks and permits, pictures...you name it they asked.
so we sued them. two of our staff are the plaintiffs. tomorrow we are heard in court. it will be a slam dunk. we will come away with a court ruling that we can have in every staging site or even in every canvassers packet stating we can go where ever the hell we choose.
this was tuesday we thought of the problem, but tomorrow we will win. you have ACT, America Votes, SEIU, Clean Water Action and the ACLU who all worked premptively to solve a problem. this is why we will win. this is why i have hope for the future.
oh and check out the papers tomorrow for news on this. our staff have done a couple of local interviews. we assume they will spin it as part of a local angle on the national work to defeat bush.
ok enough of a break, i need to get back to my work. oh and come volunteer, i already had one call from a Kossack who is coming up from the DC area. we need volunteers call me (Julia) 412.434.6192.
Update [2004-10-28 17:35:45 by juls]: here is the [ACLU Press Release http://www.pgh.aclu.org/pdf/release.pdf] (pdf warning) about the case.