Joe Certaine arrived in the early morning chill Tuesday at a church.
There would be a long week of uncertainty ahead, much that hinged on his state, but Certaine didn’t know that yet. For now, he and his “brigade” of trained volunteers were settling in to respond to acts of voter suppression on election day.
In the days leading up to the election, violent protests against the Philadelphia police shooting death of a Black man, Walter Wallace Jr, deployment of the national guard and repeated taunting by Donald Trump had the city on edge. The city’s district attorney had fired back at the President that if his “goon squad” tried to disrupt the vote, he “would have something for you”.
In that fraught atmosphere, thousands of election observers, from non-partisan groups like Common Cause and the city’s election commission, would roam the streets on Tuesday to try to keep voting from going off the rails, making it probably the most observed election in city history.
Certaine and his group would be among them, ready to roll at Greater St Matthew Baptist church, in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the northern part of the city. This would be the 73-year-old’s “last rodeo”, as he put it, crowning a lifetime of activism in voting rights and politics.
From a childhood in foster homes in Philadelphia, Certaine had risen to become the managing director of the city, Philadelphia’s highest unelected office, its chief operating officer. He was a campaign official for the former two-term Democratic governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell. He helped get the city’s first Black mayor elected, in 1983.
Tuesday’s work was not out of the norm.
The day began with a few hitches. Without keys to the church, Certaine had to wait in the cold for the church administrator to arrive. The person getting the vans the night before had a problem with his credit card and wasn’t able to have them delivered. The guy with the two-way radios hadn’t come through, either.
“Murphy’s law,” said Certaine, as shortly before 7am the administrator unlocked the door. “I’m off to a really good start.”
A few volunteers trickled in, including Rylanda Wilson, 73, a retired employee at the city’s housing authority. She brought some pillow cases she planned to knit into shirts for Haitian children for a relief organization if things got slow.
A few minutes after the polls opened at 7am, Jeff Garis, who works at a public policy thinktank, showed up. Garis, 55, has worked with Certaine for two decades on numerous elections and political issues. Today, he would be Certaine’s eyes online, tracking disturbances and helping direct volunteers to any reported incidents.
“Do we have wifi?,” asked Garis as he settled into a small desk.
Certaine swore. He dialed the church administrator, who had since left the building, for the wifi password. Her voice mailbox was full. “Other than Murphy’s law,” he said. “We don’t know what’s going on at the moment.”
A call came in. It was one of Certaine’s security people, reporting a middle-aged, white man in a cowboy hat talking to voters outside a polling station in a Black neighborhood.
“I can step in and put out a fire where you need me,” the voice on the line said.
“Just find out who he is,” Certaine said into his cellphone.
Another volunteer arrived, 44-year-old Josh Uretsky, who does data analysis for the Audubon Society. He said he told his wife that morning that it felt good to be taking action on something that had been stressing him out. She asked him: what if he had nothing to do today? He said he replied, “Well, that would be great.”
Soon there were around 15 volunteers. The group was equally split, Black and white. They were educators, lawyers, retired city workers and entrepreneurs. They hadn’t met before.
As the morning wore on, the phones remained quiet, a sign that so far voting was going smoothly. Across the country, that would mostly be the case.
The lull gave Certaine time to reminisce about past battles.
His first experience in voting rights activism came in the early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when he was hardly 20 years old. He was in Neshoba county, Mississippi, helping register Black Americans who had never voted before. It was not long after the murder there of three Black civil rights activists doing the same work. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which abolished literacy tests, poll taxes and other ways of suppressing the Black vote, had not yet been passed.
One evening, he recalled in interviews, they noticed a pickup truck following them. It forced them off the road. At gunpoint, he said, several white men made them get out of their car and walk a half-mile into the woods, in the headlights of the pickup. “There wasn’t anything we could do,” said Certaine. “They had the guns and we didn’t.”
Eventually the white men fired their shotguns in the air, laughed and drove off.
Fear has remained a primary tool of voter suppression, Certaine said, amplified by disinformation. He said even the perception of danger, fueled in part by the president’s own warnings to the city, could suppress votes.
Voter turnout in heavily Democratic Philadelphia would be critical for Democrats to overcome votes from the overwhelmingly Republican rural counties that make up much of the rest of the state. Higher than expected turnout in those red counties fueled Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, by less than one percentage point.
In the days before the election this year, Certaine fielded calls and emails from concerned residents, and he tried to calm them. One passed an email to him warning about local members of the Ku Klux Klan showing up. “We must defend ourselves every damn day,” the woman emailed Certaine.
He emailed her back with the voter hotline phone number and said his team had been preparing for this for months.
By early afternoon there still had been no calls from that hotline to Certaine’s group.
The district attorney’s election taskforce by this time had reported a couple of dozen incidents around the city, involving some minor disturbances including members of the media inadvertently blocking voters from a polling station.
“I’m really pleased that nothing is going on!” Certaine shouted. He got on the phone with his son and kibitzed about the Eagles, Philadelphia’s struggling football team.
Outside Certaine’s office, the volunteers sat in a circle, talking about everything.
They had come here braced for political confrontation on the city streets. Instead, as the day wore on, they turned their attention to other things: kids, real estate, home towns. It was a collective exhale from the political moment – even if just for a few hours.
David Birnbaum, a 32-year-old white lawyer, discovered he had gone to the same high school as several others in the room. Some kidded him about the bow-tie he was wearing, sporting the school’s colors. “It means more to me than my college or grad school,” he joked back.
Sometimes there was politics.
“OK, so I’m a Republican,” Paul Breda, 58, said to the group. He lives in Wharton, New Jersey and works in the educational software business. His confession silenced the room. After a moment, Josephia Rouse, a 36-year-old family attorney from Baltimore, nodded her head.
“OK, OK,” she said, encouragingly.
He explained to everyone his political views and how he didn’t want all Republicans to be painted with the same brush.
Off to one side, Wilson silently worked on the shirts she was making from pillowcases for Haitian children. She had managed to knit 30 of them. “I didn’t think I’d have all this time,” she said.
It turned out all the missteps that morning didn’t matter, after all. “I’m just proud,” Certaine told the group. “I’m proud of us, proud of the city.”