America Votes and the Oberlin College Democrats teamed up last Saturday to conduct a 12-hour “Halloween Phone-Bank Dance-Party.” The 17 available phone lines were filled to capacity the whole day. By the end of the day, they had more than surpassed their target of 4,000 calls, hitting 8,892 by 9 p.m.

“We made [our goal] somewhere around noon and we just kept going,” said college junior Namrata Kolachalam, co-chair of the OC Dems with college junior Brian Pugh.

The Phone-a-Thon’s aim was two-fold: to maximize the number of voters in the Nov. 7 election and to break the Lorain County Republican’s phone-a-thon record of 3,200 calls.

The OC Dems aimed to make the event fun in addition to being productive. Signs suggested that phone bankers come dressed in “things that the Republicans were likely to ban.” Several volunteers pinned leaves to their clothes and claimed to be “the environment.”

Phone bankers focused on soliciting peoples’ perspectives on key democratic candidates in Ohio races, such as the candidate for governor Ted Strickland and candidate for State Senate Sue Morano. Additionally, respondents were asked to identify the issue they considered most important. Such information will be used to focus mobilization efforts closer to the election.

The event was one in a series of America Votes’ “Get-Out-the-Vote” campaign.

“The whole point was to prepare for GOTV,” said Pugh. “It would be a shame if all this hard work came to nothing in a weak GOTV week. The phone bank was the seed; the election will be the harvest.”

–With reporting by Maxine Kaplan