Election Day

Dan Simon had a lot of work to do on Election Day.

But the Seven Stories Press publisher knew there wouldn’t be any progress on those 50 books that needed editing, marketing, designing or some other i-n-g. His mind, and the minds of his staff, were elsewhere.

When one of Simon’s part-time employees told him she was going to juggle her work schedule so she could help turn Quakertown, Penn. from a red town to a blue one on Election Day, he readily agreed. Three of her officemates thought that sounded like a great idea and decided to join her, especially since Simon was willing to give them the day off.

“I don’t think anyone would have been working,” said Veronica Liu, 30, production manager, while sitting shotgun on the road to Quakertown with two other co-workers.

A Precedent in Politics

For an election cycle where the nation’s souring economy has become today’s central issue, building it back up is largely a job that can wait until tomorrow. For today, at least, politics took precedence, even in workplaces. Some took extended lunch breaks to go vote or make calls for their candidate. Others “cyber slacked” at work, obsessively checking news updates on the Web.

And then there are people like Mysore Gandhi, 65, a researcher in cardiology for a children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, Long Island. With six months of unused vacation, Gandhi told his boss that he was going home on Election Day to “sit back and see the historic day.” He got a blank stare and several of his co-workers thought he was crazy. They reminded him there was a reason that polls stayed open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“I’m just relaxing on my chair, put on CNN and I’m soaking in the information,” he said around 4 p.m.

But Gandhi knows a lot rests on this election. He is worried about what opportunities there might be for his children and believes the country needs “change.”

A Powerful Force

For Gandhi and Simon’s employees, this election has proved there is a force out there larger than the daily grind. That’s what Greg DeLucia, 29 and Dan Connell, 29, both reality TV producers for “Wife Swap,” found out this week when an ABC executive sent them this email: “There’s only one thing more important than ‘Wife Swap,’ that’s voting.” They upped their boss by taking an extended lunch break to work at a phone bank for Barack Obama on Monday.

It turns out that it’s not only good company policy to allow people to take off work to vote — it’s the law. New York is one of 23 states that allow workers to leave the office for a period of time to vote on the company dime, according to Find Law. If an employee doesn’t have four consecutive non-working hours between polls opening and closing to vote, they are allowed two hours to skedaddle. That is, of course, as long as the employee makes the request between two and 10 days before Election Day.

But really, for those left at work, how much is actually getting done?

“I can tell you the water cooler is not confined to the water cooler,” said Grant Murphy, vice president for enterprise solutions at Secure Computing, which helps businesses filter Internet content. He said this election is not unlike the Olympics and March Madness, other periods when employee goofing on the Internet can cause real headaches for a company.

“If you have a large enterprise where you have several people doing ‘political research’ to see what McCain did on SNL, that really kills Internet bandwidth,” said Murphy. “The net effect is that Internet access will be impaired.”

Web Hits

Last election cycle, clicks on presidential websites were concentrated during business hours, according to comScore, Inc. A spokesman for the company said he didn’t know if that was the case this year. But the group did see that Obama’s website got 5.3 million unique hits in September, up 1,176 percent for the same period last year. Johnmccain.com got 2.9 million first time visitors.

Huffingtonpost.com, the most popular political blog and news site, saw unique traffic rise 474 percent for the month, compared to last year. Politico.com, the number two site, saw 344 percent more eyeballs this September than last.

But should employers block such sites?

“I don’t think companies should block news-related sites because of the many legitimate uses for news sites, and there’s a risk of harming employee morale by being overly restrictive,” said David Burt, a blogger at Filteringfacts.org, who used to work at Secure Computing and N2H2, another company that filters websites for clients.

Simon, the publisher, certainly won’t have to worry about that. Two thirds of his staff took the day off.

“I just feel too nervous about the election,” Simon, 50, said while driving to an Obama phone bank in the city on Tuesday. “I would be doing things that have nothing to do with what is going on in the world, which doesn’t feel right.”

Magaly Garcia swung her hips as she stepped left, left, right, right, then back to the middle at a Mexican dance club in Jackson Heights, Queens. Two bucks there buys a song, a lesson in the traditional dance Cumbia, and an earful of politics.

“Obama’s more for the people,” said Garcia, 22, in Spanish. “And he cares about the poor more than McCain.” Her dancing job at the Roosevelt Avenue club fetches enough cash to survive and to send home.

This election season, thousands of immigrants in New York have come home to a daily stream of presidential election coverage on television. From exotic dancers to taxi drivers, immigrants’ lives are affected by the shifting economy, and thus have a stake in the outcome of the election. But noncitizens can do little more to influence it than talk to friends, family and dance partners, and many don’t expect much from the government.

Jobs Are Key

“They can help the economy get more jobs,” said Garcia, who moved to the U.S. three years ago from Mexico City without government approval or her newborn son, Armando. “But I don’t think they’ll be able to help people without papers.”

On Election Day, 45-year-old Olga Flores wore a black bomber jacket and scanned a long line of people stretching down a Williamsburg, Brooklyn sidewalk. But she was not looking at a polling line. Rather, she was staring at her competition. She and other women from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Poland waited for local residents who need their houses cleaned to hire them. Not many came.

Flores moved to New York 20 years ago from Mexico City and has no legal standing. She vented in Spanish.
“What kind of opinion can we have? We have no voice or vote,” she said. “If there was a way to vote, I would vote for change.”

Not every noncitizen shared Flores’ vision. Taxi driver Asif Raqiq, a 36-year-old from Pakistan, would vote for McCain if he could. He felt Republicans could better handle it “If something were to happen, say with Pakistan,” and added that McCain “would be very cool minded.”

As Raqiq waited for a fare at LaGuardia Airport, his body tensed at the mention of the Democratic candidate.
“Obama’s very young, inexperienced,” he said. “You can tell by the way he talks.”

A mile away, near the 82nd Street stop on the No. 7 line, a Brazilian exotic dancer named Patricia chatted on a smoke break. She declined to reveal her last name. A rhinestone bra peeked out from under her faux-fur collared jacket.

Patricia came to the United States three months after she lost her job as a factory manager in Brazil. She pointed to her white leather purse, which she said was made at the factory she ran in Minas Gerais, a central Brazilian state, and said she hoped a change in government would help her return to the industry.
“Obama will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.,” she said.

Call For Representation

Bryan Pu-Folkes, a Jackson Heights attorney and founder of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an advocacy organization, feels immigrants should be politically represented.
“Why shouldn’t they have a say in the laws?” he said. His group supported a City Council bill that would allow legal non-citizens to vote in New York City municipal elections. The bill stalled in 2006, but Pu-Folkes plans to carry on the effort. He added that even illegal immigrants contribute to the economy by paying sales tax.

Juan Carlos, a 30-year-old dishwasher from Guatemala, passed out menus on the sidewalk for a Jackson Heights Indian restaurant. He explained why he felt Obama’s immigration policy would make him the better president.

“He’ll make it so everyone’s free to work,” Carlos said in Spanish, adding play on words that suggested the candidate was intelligent and worked for the people: “Intellegente y por la gente.”

Sandra C. Roa contributed to this article.

The line at Public School 163 on the Upper West Side made its way outside the building, curved around a fence, continued to the street and finally made a U-turn back to the center of the schoolyard.

Joe Robins, a 31-year-old Obama campaign volunteer patrolled the line, talking to each one of the hundreds of voters to make sure they knew their election district.

“I’m nervous. I woke up a lot during the night,” Robins said.

Since last November,  he has been volunteering with the Broadway Democrats. “It’s a great year to be a Democrat and to be volunteering,” Robins said.

Time and Money

While many New Yorkers consider their civic duty to begin and end when they pull the lever on Election Day, thousands of Upper West Siders like Robins have worked overtime to make Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States.

The Upper West Side is the most Obama-friendly neighborhood in the country: As of Oct. 27, people residing west of Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street had donated nearly $6.5 million to the Obama campaign. Three of the top 10 zip codes, in terms of donations to Obama’s campaign, are on the Upper West Side, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group.

“My guess is it’s the most active part of the city,” said Steve Max, 68, a manager at the Three Parks Independent Democrats and Broadway Democrats, which share a storefront on Broadway at 105th Street.

McCain Stiffed

While Upper West Siders have dug deep into their pockets for Obama, they haven’t for Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The center’s statistics show that residents have donated a comparatively meager $705,040 to his campaign.

Upper West Siders also have been generous with donating time to Obama’s campaign. On Election Day morning, the Three Parks storefront was buzzing with volunteers, though most of the work was done. The volunteers helped register nearly 7,000 new voters in the month and a half before Election Day,  Max said.

“People just want to be involved,” said Stephanie Lasher, 63, a volunteer with Community Free Democrats.  “New Yorkers are fired up.”

Phil Caracci was tired but exhilarated on the morning of the election.
“I checked my last email at 2 a.m. and woke up at 4:30 this morning,” he said. “I’m excited that this day is here, but I’m looking forward to sleeping tomorrow.”

Caracci runs McCain Manhattan, an all-volunteer organization that has mobilized New Yorkers to get out the vote for John McCain. The morning of the election, Caracci and a few hundred McCain supporters gathered in front of ABC Studios in Times Square for one final rally before the election is decided.

“Good Morning America” invited both McCain and Obama supporters to come out for their candidates. McCain enthusiasts far outnumbered those holding Obama signs.

‘Our Traffic Island’

“I just feel we have the momentum, I mean right here in Manhattan we won on this piece of rock,” Caracci said. “This is our traffic island, so it’s very exciting.”

Even though advocates of McCain have taken to the city streets to support the Republican presidential ticket, many realized long ago that New York was a lost cause. The McCain campaign’s decision to move many resources out of New York City months ago left the Republican presidential efforts in the hands of volunteers.

Ed Cox, the chairman for the McCain campaign in New York, said the Times Square rally was the culmination of the volunteers’ work.

“We’ve have had a great time fighting for every vote here in New York State,” he said. “Also we’ve been telephoning across the country, helping in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and it’s just been a great race.”

High Hopes

Some Manhattan McCain campaigners called undecided voters in swing states. Others got on buses to help sway voters in Pennsylvania.

At the rally, many New York Republicans remained hopeful despite the forecast Obama victory.

“It’s getting really close, and I think people will really come out in the end for McCain,” said New York resident Cecile Dacudau, who was comforted by the turnout in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1. “ I post things about him on my Facebook and people give me a hard time for it. People in this city think you’re nuts to be voting for McCain,” she said.