Diane Feinstein Lobby Day - University of San Francisco, CA

On November 15th, the Democracy Matter coordinators from the campuses of University of San Francisco, UC Davis, and San Francisco State University lobbied Diane Feinstein in her downtown office in San Francisco. We (Dallas Cole, Constance Gordon, and I) met with Feinstein’s aid and explained the basics of the Fair Elections Now Act. We refrained from asking for direct endorsement, but felt very good about relaying the important information so that Feinstein could make a knowledgeable decision when it comes time to vote on the Act. The aid, Assistant Field Representative John Murray, was very receptive and we were able to answer most of his questions.

We spoke about FENA from the perspective of political science college students who wish to first, vote for more clean election candidates right now because we believe they represent our interests better than dirty candidates and second, hope to have the option of running for office in the future because of the clean elections system. Also, we spoke about the connection between clean elections and the rise in women’s involvement in government. We believed that Feinstein would be particularly interested in this statistic because she supports women in politics.

Lacy Clark
Democracy Matters Campus Coordinator
University of San Franciso

Campus Call-In, Minnesota

Call-In day was what i would call a success here at Gustavus. We tabled from 9:00am until 3:00pm (i told everyone to essentially think of it as if we were tabling to advertise some event, except this time the event would be going on while tabling, so we needed to be more vocal and attention-grabbing). Kira had the brilliant idea of making cookies to give to each person who made a call, thus we called it "Cookie for a Call" (it's really hard to reject a warm, gooey chocolate chip cookie). I wish we had kept a tally of how many people stopped to call (my fault), but i can say with certainty that a lot of people stopped by since we made about 200 cookies to start with and had about 50 left by the end of the day (that would imply about 6-7.5% of the campus called, but that's not including the people who called and didn't want a cookie). So, despite my poor attempt at some statistical support, i know that we definitely helped to keep thephone lines busy throughout the day (we had people leave plenty of phone messages because the offices were busy with other calls).  Here's the rap I wrote that we had people use for their calls (not exactly, great, but i think it sufficed):

"Hi, my name is _______ and I am a student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, MN. I am calling to encourage Senator/Representative ________ to support the Fair Elections Now Act which would give Congress the option to have publicly-funded elections.  This bill is important because of the way our current democracy is being undermined by special interests and "big money." I believe in having a American democracy in which the voices of the voters truly count and make a difference in the decisions made by our nation's top legislators, and I believe that fair and clean elections are a step in the right direction for a more honest, more people-oriented government."

DM Campus Coordinator