Ocasio HQ: Volunteer Prep Meeting
We're going to start the meeting in a few minutes.
The committee member went to a committee member's meeting.
So, on tonight's day, we're not going to meet everybody sitting inside.
I'm sorry? The committee member won't be here this morning.
How long? Then we can take the chairs up and shoot the sedation talk.
The committee member is downtown.
They have a committee member's meeting.
The Alderman is on his way right now.
He's at Clemente High School with a citizenship workshop.
What I have here are absentees.
Absentees is crucial to this campaign.
Everybody's been doing a good job.
Do you want to pass these out to the precinct coordinators? This is all the way from precinct 1 to 11 only? No, all the way through.
What you have here is a list of absentees that were submitted to the board of elections.
If you notice, it shows a lot of open absentees, which means that that person did not, in fact, return the absentee application to the board.
You need to get out there and make sure that this person signs it.
So, precinct coordinators only.
Huh? Are you a precinct coordinator? Can I give you a copy? Huh? Can I give you a copy because I don't have enough? Can I give you one? Sure, that's okay.
Applications, let's take these.
The last day to submit applications for absentee ballots.
Okay, let's have one meeting, please.
The last day to submit applications for absentee ballots is next week, Friday.
Which means, once you turn this into the campaign office sign, it's legible, we have to return it to the board of elections, then that ballot is mailed.
To the individual that has to vote, they have to mail it back to the board of elections.
So therefore, for it to be in on time, it has to be Friday.
This is including, what's the date on here? As of last week.
I know we've been working off the walk sheets, but this is new information.
You need to double check that.
We need somebody to bring the signs, Pedro.
We have a very, very vital sign campaign.
Yesterday, in fact, the Department of Streets and Sanitation, by city council ordinance, cleaned a ward of signs.
All signs of advertisement or anything else.
We do not put political signs on polls.
Which means one thing and one thing only.
That person supports our candidates.
I know in the past what we've been doing is asking for addresses.
We're into the last week of the campaign.
Put them in the windows, not in the back seat of the cars, or plug in a hole that the draft comes in.
It's nice weather out there today.
We're going to continue to do walk -throughs.
Also, we got a couple of different events.
The committeemen talked about them in the past.
The Aldermen should be here in a few minutes.
Please only take what you're going to use.
These signs are very expensive.
So please take whatever you're going to use.
Do you want to pass those out to them? Completed walk sheets.
Does anybody have any completed walk sheets? Okay, I know we've been collecting those regularly on Saturday.
We're into the last week of the campaign.
It doesn't appear that our opponents are very active.
What they are probably, I guess you could consider them graffiti artists.
All they do is just put up all this campaign literature out there.
They're not talking the issues.
So what we need to do is continue with this momentum.
It's a nice day out there today.
It's supposed to be about 50 degrees.
A lot of folks will be out shopping.
A lot of people will be at home.
We need to spend each and every day until February 28th out there getting our message across.
What else do we have to do? On your poll sheets you'll notice that there's a little cross in front of the name that indicates that that person in fact has been recently registered.
It doesn't appear on the news sheet.
What we have to do is provide this information to the Board of Election officials.
I'm going to turn it over to Alderman.
He's got a few words to say to you.
Then we're going to get out there and we're going to do a good job.
Hey, we're going to have one meeting here.
First of all, I want to thank you all again for being here with us.
We got some of the people are doing the citizenship stuff, but they're going to be hitting their precincts in a couple of hours.
So don't feel like you're all alone here.
There's certain people doing some work and they'll be out there for a little while.
Let me just thank these guys for being here.
They're over here to us, Alderman Burke.
So we want to thank them for being here with us.
Let me just say a few quick things.
If you notice, we got sometime endorsement.
We got the Tribune endorsement.
We got Miguel de Valle and Roberto Maldonado's endorsement.
We got the Latina's endorsement.
And wait till two days before the election or three days before the election.
Everybody in the 26th Ward will be receiving a little postcard.
Mayor Richard Daly, Congressman Gutierrez, Senator Miguel de Valle, the firemen, the policemen, sometimes the Tribune is going to go and list all of our endorsements to say Billy Ocasio is the person to get the job done.
Not only that, I don't know how many of you saw Channel 44 yesterday.
But Channel 44 yesterday, we had the Congressman and the Senator did a little bit of attacking yesterday.
Not to anybody in the 26th Ward, but in the 35th Ward.
Now remember we had said we were going to stay out of everybody else's elections.
We weren't going to endorse anybody anywhere else.
Although they did the attack, they didn't say who they were going to endorse in the 35th Ward or anything like that because we're not going to.
But however, they did tell people who not to vote for.
And one of those happened to be Vilma Colon yesterday.
I just can't believe what she's trying to do out there.
She's going to be here election day is the 28th.
You know she voted absentee ballot.
God, how does someone do that? How do you go, you're a candidate, you're going to be in town and you vote absentee ballot.
They got her for basically being running in the Republican races the last two or three times.
So she's got some heat on her.
Does it affect us at all? You know, Mel is putting her up.
This isn't a campaign against Alderman Mel.
This is basically against Vilma Colon.
And I think it's something that needs to be done because we've talked long enough about plantation politics.
It's time for us to take back what is ours.
You know, the 35th Ward was created for a Latino to be in that position.
Well, people should respect that and let a Latino be in that position and not let someone else's influence come into a community as ours.
Anyways, it's not going to affect us.
And you know how it's not going to affect us? We would have known by now.
But actually, we're doing an endorsement on Monday morning.
And the endorsement on Monday morning comes from Rob Legoyevich.
Rob Legoyevich, for those of you who may not know, he's the state representative.
And he's going to endorse us Monday morning.
So it's going to be a good hit for us.
It's going to be great out in the North End for those people who Mel has basically ran that area for such a long time.
That's going to be a good one for us.
So we'll have that Monday morning.
We'll have the congressman's endorsement Monday morning.
We had the one with the house.
And then the last one was the one with the boxer.
This is an ugly picture, isn't it? Anyways, it got the message across.
I think people just opened it up because it was an ugly picture.
And it didn't say here who's doing what.
All it says is somebody's fighting back against crime and gangs.
So we opened it up and it's a nice piece.
Anyways, we got two more pieces.
The next piece is going to hit this week.
That one's only going out to the Spanish people in the ward.
And that one's going to be a nice piece.
The last one's the postcard, like I said.
And that one should tie things up for us a couple days before election.
I think things are going very good.
Where is Suchet? Suchet here? He must be out working his precinct.
He had 27 posters up last Saturday.
And the rest of you are doing very good.
The best part about this is we don't have any posters on poles and we don't have any posters on trees.
Posters on trees, they killed them and we don't need to put them on poles.
We have done something that this community has never seen and we're still winning this.
But people seem to respond to that and they like the idea of it.
So I want to thank you all for sticking with us and doing what we needed to be done here.
We got a bunch of walkthroughs set up.
These walkthroughs, you need to, excuse me Alderman, what you need to do, this is the last week.
We know it's very hectic right now.
So the committeemen, the Aldermen, sat down and they put these walkthroughs together.
Each and every precinct coordinator was notified about these walkthroughs.
The Alderman is going to be out there walking if you're there or not.
And I'm sure everybody is going to be involved.
But that's not about to change.
So before you leave today, you need to check the schedule in the back.
And also we're going to continue to call and let you know about that.
We've been doing this now for a few weeks.
I've been walking through for a few months now.
And we still got 10 days left.
Those 10 days we're planning on covering how many precincts? I'll tell you exactly 14.
The Alderman has walked through the majority of the ward.
You have to realize, does anybody know how many people reside in the 26th ward? We just got the new totals.
Those are the people who reside in your 26th ward.
So on a day like today, when it's nice outside, you're not going to catch everybody home.
So when these people tell you, we haven't seen the Alderman, that's not true.
The Alderman is touching base.
He's out there each and every day.
Easily we could have pulled everyone in here today and had a good meeting.
However, there's other work that needs to be done in our community besides our election.
We are working on the election and we're going to continue to work on the election.
However, this citizenship thing that's happening, let me tell you that at seven o 'clock this morning, people were there.
At nine o 'clock, we were already turning away people.
We had the first 500 people at nine o 'clock in the morning.
They were already turning away people for the citizenship thing.
So those are things that are important for our community and we have to continue to work on those things.
And we're going to do everything we can.
Election day, we need your volunteers.
I need to know this week, we need to know who you have.
We're going to work with you in each one of the precincts.
We need to know your plus and minus counts.
We'll be calling you in and we're going to ask you, hey, we gave you a walk sheet out of that walk sheet.
What pluses do you have? What minuses do you have? And then we're going to keep away from the minuses.
They're not even going to get any type of information.
But, you know, we need that information this week.
There is a lot of things that we need to do.
We need to continue to talk about the mayor.
I want, you know, we need to get some more Mayor Daley signs up.
Those of you, you know, it's not hard.
You know, the poll shows in the 26th Ward, the mayor is doing 82 percent, 82 percent approval rating.
So let's just don't be shy about it.
Tell them to talk about the mayor.
Tell them to put the mayor's sign up.
It's one of the things we're working on.
Let me show you something else and I'm not going to say anything about this.
I'm not going to say anything.
I'm just going to show it to you.
I'll tell you who's in the picture.
I'll tell you who's in the picture.
The way they say it says this person is Commissioner Joe Barrios.
Commissioner Joe Barrios, Joe Barrios in the middle here.
And this is the way they put it.
Benny Santos and the last person here.
Edgar Lopez, representative Edgar Lopez.
Just so you all know what's really going on.
We got about a hundred of those, right? A hundred of those.
What we're doing is we're going to take ours and staple them around his.
People can put them up in their lawns.
We're going to get a lot more stuff for election day.
So we just need you all to find out where these signs need to go.
No, we have a list that we're giving out today and that's the most recent list from the Board of Elections.
And again, I touched on it earlier.
You need to touch base with these folks and find out why in fact that absentee application has not been returned to the Board of Elections.
We got a few fundraisers coming up.
We had a small one last night at Mochitos.
What do we got, Nereida? Tuesday, San Lorenzo and Wednesday, Taneas.
Tuesday, San Lorenzo on the corner of Fullerton in California.
They're doing a little private one for us over there.
This is your last time to party before election.
I'm telling you, you got Saturday.
And I'm going to be around it at certain time until everybody go home.
Anyways, any questions? Anything? Yeah.
On the poll sheets, you got the plus marks for registered new voters.
And that list that was handed out today, are those voters on that list? Yes.
They're not on that list? You mean the walk sheets? No.
Are you referring to this? Yes.
This was just given to me by the board of elections.
But this is the most recent printing of the ones that they received.
But don't take this as a Bible or gospel.
Because you know, you know in fact who you took applications from.
But just go back, double check.
This is just using the infrastructure work.
Everything that was completed in the last two years, those letters had, they started going out Thursday, I believe.
Anyways, people get those letters.
And it's just another thing that we've done.
I mean we've fixed more streets in this ward than they've ever fixed.
We've got 68 streets in 24 months.
I mean that's a whole lot of money.
And again, we're talking about $20 million in 24 months.
And what are the opponents saying? Here are their attacks.
Well, you build a vocational center.
One for the gangs on this side and one for the gangs on this side.
For 11 years, people waited for this.
There was an advisory committee from the community for 11 years.
But they've got to find something.
So that's one of the attacks that they're using on us.
What's the other attack? The other attack is on the library.
Now it's like, well yeah, you've got a library.
But we want to know what kind of books are going in the library.
I mean it's just little things that don't make any sense.
I received this card and it's a great card.
I think everybody should listen to this one.
I don't know if you guys could put this on camera.
It's a picture of a lady probably in the 1920s or something like that.
And it says, this is a nice card actually.
I only want to say hello and hope that the world, in all its splendor, is providing you with joy, happiness, and inner peace.
Just watch out for all the assholes.
So people are taking care of us.
I mean everywhere I go, you know, the biggest problem I fear right now is that people are so comfortable.
People are so comfortable out there.
Everywhere I go, I walk down the streets, walk into people's homes, oh, don't worry about it.
But we just cannot give in to that.
You know, people feel very comfortable.
And all it takes is for one big lie to come out.
And we're going to have a battle on our hands.
What do we got? We got as far as...
That's all we have is a week to go.
So that's it for today's meeting.
If you need this information that you always smoke about, please come up and get it.
Come here! Come here! Come here! Come here! We need signs.
What do you want me to do? I want to go this way around her.
So you're gonna have to go to the You want to do a walkthrough now? I'm doing a walkthrough...
Are we saying now? Now? Now I don't think.
I'm gonna give you a walkthrough.
I don't know what my schedule looks like.
Okay, so they want to follow you on a walkthrough.
Okay, so people are already following you on a walkthrough.
Says he has three votes for me! Thank you.
This one I am supposed to go back to.
We'll do that just a bunch of people.
From Italy all the way to Chicago.
Where? I'm not very interested.
And then I gotta pick up that absentee bail.
And what did you do? Right by Walphex.
I talked to the other officer that I already talked to.
I said, well, the people you told, they weren't there.
But I talked to a guy who said, care of the officers.
You would get together with them.
Said people wanted to put them in the room.
Did you get some of the small daily signs? I may? Well, yes.
You came here for the area? Uh -huh.
I'm here to bring the campaign of Billy Ocasio, the 26th.
You have a poster on the window.
I wanted to put a poster on the window.
Is this supposed to be there now? Yes.
Or do you want to take it to the other side? I live in Altruvalles.
Let me write down the address.
Let me have the pen that you got.
Let's stop by People because they have some tea ballots that I gotta pick up.
They got my sign up, yeah? Where? Over here.
Is Mark here? Mark is not here.
He's the sign up for the people in the area.
I'll tell Luisa to give me that statue and put it on the floor of her house.
How are you? Good, how are you? How's Katajo? She's with us.
They're from the people in the area.
They're from the people in the area.
So you do that here, like a lot of people come here to the store.
Different parties or whatever.
This is, you know, a community store.
She knows a lot of people and she helps me a lot.
You know what? I needed this...
And I needed to bring some out.
To Simone? Simone and that other lady that that left Simone's house.
Because she said they wouldn't be, because they would be working in another area.
So they would give it back to me.
So fill them out and then tell them to come back and pick them up.
Okay, it's a nice day today, isn't it? Compared to last week.
Do you need a piece at your dinner? Maple wood.
Who? The people that are being watched now.
Because it was Maplewood, right? The Mexican lady.
The Mexican lady? The old lady.
Where should they go? To? No, Maplewood.
Oh, that lady, we're going to go to her house.
I'm going to put that one in my house.
Put one in your house on the big daily side.
Right there in front of my white guy.
Let's see if we can get a house.
That's why I go there and watch now.
Because she lives right there.
I could cross over there and see if she's there.
Huh? The lady over there crossed the street.
How are you, sir? Good morning.
I'm the captain of the precinct of this area.
I wanted to know if you wanted to put a daily sign in the front.
I'm going to throw it in your house.
We're going to put a sign there.
Is it open here? You have to put both of these.
You have to put only one? Only one.
Why did you decide to vote? Because you have so many candidates.
We're going to the office of Ocasio.
Footage documenting a volunteer strategy meeting at the headquarters of Ald. Billy Ocasio, where Ocasio addresses the group about absentee ballots and previous accomplishments.
Ocasio's Precinct Captain Nereida Ayala, and precinct workers Jaime Madonado and Mario Rosado, are shown canvassing door to door in the 26th Ward to distribute Daley yard signs and identify supporters.
Spanish
