Editor’s Note: The Beachcomber talked to six islanders who volunteered with the Democratic Party in North Carolina, Florida and Nevada. These are their stories.

From the desert just outside Las Vegas to the campus of the University of North Carolina to Little Haiti, just outside Miami, islanders travelled far and wide in recent weeks to do their part in supporting the Democratic Party.

With the state of Washington voting decidedly blue in every election since 1988 thanks in large part to Seattle and highly populated King County’s concentration of liberal-minded individuals, it can hardly be considered a swing state. Many called Hillary Clinton winning Washington months before Nov. 8 — and indeed she did. Since Washington’s mind was made up, several islanders travelled elsewhere in the weeks leading up to the election in an effort to convince battleground states — those that can reasonably be won by either major-party presidential candidate — to go blue. Of the three states visited by these islanders, one went blue: Nevada.

Nevada: Dale Greenfeld

Four days before the election, islander Dale Greenfeld flew to Las Vegas, Nevada, to canvass door-to-door for the Democratic Party. Not only was she pushing for votes for Clinton but, perhaps more importantly, she was calling for Democratic votes in the state’s Senate race, which pitted incumbent Republican Joe Heck against Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto.

“It was a very, very reactionary congressman (Heck) running against a progressive Latina,” Greenfeld said. “It was very, very, very important the state not only go blue, but that she win that Senate seat.”

Equipped with a list from the county elections office showing those who voted for Clinton in the primary, but had not yet returned their general election ballot, she knocked on doors. In three days — Nov. 5, 6 and 7 — she rapped on the front doors of 263 homes in six housing developments. The developments were diverse, she said, with Hispanic, black and white families all from the lower-middle class. Reactions to her were just as varied.

“Overall, the Latino community was the most welcoming,” she said. “The hardest to deal with were white women. Everyone else fell in the middle.”

She chronicled her experience on Facebook through short videos and, in between comments about sore feet and an exhausted body, she talked about her two most interesting run-ins: a man with a gun in his pants and a sleepy woman.

“We knock on this one guy’s door, and the kid yells for dad and the dad comes out and he is pencil thin … with … his size one jeans like falling off of him,” she said in a video posted on Nov. 6. “That’s not the best part. The best part was the Beretta in the front of his pants so that if, God forbid, he reached for it incorrectly, he was going to shoot his package off. We (Greenfeld had a partner on one of the three days she was there) just looked at each other, and we’re not even going to notice the gun. We decide we’re just going to talk to this guy as if he doesn’t have a gun in his pants.”

The second experience Greenfeld talked about involved a woman sleeping and a missing sign.

“We rang the doorbell, and we’re chatting while we wait to see if someone is home … so this woman comes to the door, and she’s obviously been sleeping and she answers the door and says, ‘I’m sleeping, I work at night. Can’t you read the sign?’ So we look at the door, and there is no sign, and she goes and she grabs the sign obviously laying next to the door that she has for such occasions that said, ‘I’m sleeping,’ smacks it on the front door and slams the door in our face. We got a good laugh out of that.”

But with the humor of colorful characters also came sadness and frustration about those who were unaware and who had made up their minds not to vote. Greenfeld said those who said they weren’t voting were impossible to turn around.

“One 19-year-old boy said, ‘Oh, tomorrow is election day?’ He didn’t know if he was registered. He didn’t care who was running. That was painful,” she said.

The work, overall, is “exhausting, emotionally and physically,” she said, but worthwhile because she believes in the cause.

“You have to shut up and put your time and effort where your mouth is,” she said. “You can’t just do the fun things, you have to do what is needed. I wouldn’t have traded doing that for anything. Nevada turned blue, the (Democratic) senator was elected and marijuana was legalized. I have to believe that what I did made a difference.”

But not all of the six interviewed had their states go the way they hoped. For the three islanders who spent time in Florida, the Sunshine State’s 119,770 more votes for Trump than Clinton turned the state red.

Florida: Janie Starr, Marc Pease and Suzanne Mager

While Greenfeld knocked on doors in Nevada’s sweltering, dry heat, islander Janie Starr took on the doors of neighborhoods in Florida’s coastal and humid Broward County, north of Miami.

Like Greenfeld, Starr said the demographics of her area were “all over the map,” with “lots of low-income folks who were Democrats, but didn’t vote” and “well-off Russians who were Trump supporters.” Equipped with the same kind of list from the election office that Greenfeld had, she said she knocked on hundreds of doors and made “zillions” of phone calls.

“My name is Janie, and I’m a volunteer with Hillary. I am seeing if you have had a chance to vote. If you have, have you voted for her? If you haven’t voted yet, let’s make a plan,” Starr said rattling off her doorstep spiel.

She received wide-ranging reactions to the speech and said that was the most profound part of the experience.

“I had Haitian women hug me and thank me, and I had men yelling the F-word and telling me to get off their lawn. You never knew who would be at the door,” she said. “It was always a surprise. I was never afraid.”

She said it is important to note that she met very polite and very rude individuals on both sides of the political aisle, but she was most disappointed by the number of college-age women supporting Trump.

“The numbers of white, college women unfazed by the misogyny and sexism was shocking. It’s white privilege and choosing to ignore what is hurting minorities, women and children,” she said.

On a positive note, she added that she had a chance to practice her Spanish and “got really good” at talking fast, campaign Spanish. She said the other volunteers she worked with were also “such a treat.”

“There were women in their 70s and 80s coming in all the time,” Starr said. “We were committed to what we believed was a greater good.”

Starr was in Florida for two weeks and flew back on Election Night, Nov. 8. Broward County went more than 80 percent for Clinton, but it wasn’t enough.

“I am in a state of shock and grief,” Starr said later. “It’s a time for compassion. Nobody likes to lose, but I feel like there’s so much at stake. I went (and did this) for my daughter, my granddaughter and those who couldn’t.”

Not far from Starr, Marc Pease worked the phonelines while his wife, Suzanne Mager, worked on voter protection in Miami, in a neighborhood known as Liberty City. The historic city is home to one of the largest concentrations of black people in South Florida.

Pease worked at a storefront office set up for the campaign, calling to recruit volunteers and voters to make sure they were registered and knew where to vote, though he said many in the area were from Haiti and were not U.S. citizens.

“Dealing with language barriers, that was the hardest part,” he said. “I would have to say who I was, what I was calling about, ask if they knew about early voting and their polling location. It was what I wanted to do, and I felt encouraged every time I left.”

Pease described the experience as “encouraging” numerous times over his nearly 45-minute conversation with The Beachcomber. He said he was encouraged by the volunteers around him and by the environment of the city, including the Rasta and Reggae shop next door, whose speakers blaring Bob Marley made the campaign office’s wall shake.

“It was a very different environment from what I’d ever experienced,” he said.

More than 400 calls later and 20 to 30 volunteers secured, he also flew back on election day after a discussion with the volunteers he had worked with for two weekends.

“We would all say, ‘This is not the way we wanted this to come out, but this is what we have, and we’ll move forward.’ It was an energetic group that really were in the streets. It was quite something to be around,” he said.

Volunteering in an altogether different area of the election process, Pease’s wife, Mager, who is an attorney, watched the polls for discrimination and intimidation. She and her group of volunteers were trained in election law and stood inside and outside polling places making sure that all who were eligible to vote got the chance to.

“(Communication) is a serious issue where I was,” she said. “The ballots are printed in English, French, Spanish and Creole, but no one at the polling places spoke those languages. Voters would come in, and they couldn’t read. They had no one available to read their ballot to them in their language.”

She said she speaks French, but voters were bringing in family members and people off the street to help read and translate.

Aside from the language and communication issues, Mager said she witnessed one instance of voter intimidation, where a credentialed poll observer was “trying to intimidate” someone who was assisting a voter who was not literate in Creole.

“The poll observer was following him, trying to take his picture. He was thrown out,” she said.

The next day there was an interesting situation.

“The poll was deemed inaccessible by a 10K race. All of the roads in the area were closed for two hours,” she explained. “Within one minute of the poll closing (for the day), we received a court order mandating the polling place stay open for an extra two hours.”

With the help of Pease and volunteers like him, word of the extra hours for voting got out on electronic billboards, flyers, local television and the radio.

“We got a steady stream of voters,” she said through tears. “We basically tried to get every vote counted and let everyone know their rights. It was a team.”

The Miami area went blue, and Mager said that on Nov. 9, she was happy to say she did something that mattered.

“I wanted to do everything I could in a battleground state,” she said.

North Carolina: Lynn Greiner and John Midgley

If drama was the name of this year’s presidential election, then North Carolina was the diva that made it all so. The state made headlines on election night with some news outlets calling it the most critical swing state of 2016.

According to election coverage by Business Insider, polls closed in North Carolina at 7:30 p.m., but a lawsuit was filed in Durham County to extend polling hours. As a result, voting was extended in several precincts.

At the heart of all of this were islanders Lynn Greiner and her husband, John Midgley. The two, like Mager in Florida, were volunteering doing voter protection, and Greiner was stationed at North Carolina State University in Wake County.

“It’s the worst polling place,” Greiner said. “Students had to wait four hours to vote. They had the polls set up at the edge of campus in a tiny room with three computers. It was made to make people wait.”

The process was made to make Millenials who are highly likely to vote Democratic wait, get frustrated or run out of time and not vote.

“It’s a very conservative state and gerrymandered very badly towards Republicans,” she said. “The electoral board throws up challenges.”

In fact, an August article in Raleigh’s The News & Observer newspaper reports a panel of federal judges ruled the map used to elect the North Carolina General Assembly is unconstitutional “because many of the districts are racially gerrymandered.”

“It’s one of those states that is turning a little blue, but is tightly controlled by a worried, Republican legislature,” Greiner said. “They’re afraid all these younger people and minorities will vote against them, so they’re claiming all this voter fraud. They’re freaked out.”

Greiner said she sought out North Carolina when looking for places to volunteer because of all of these issues.

Midgley seconded Greiner and said that the voting process is so much simpler in Washington, and he wanted to see, first hand, what those in other states deal with.

According to Midgely’s blog that he updated from the front lines in Raleigh, language barriers for those who spoke Spanish were a huge problem.

“There are 900,000 Latinos in North Carolina, but no ballots printed in Spanish or any language except English,” he wrote. “There are apparently methods that allow Spanish-speakers and others with limited English to get individual help at the polls if they bring someone, and there is a phone number that people can call, but it all seems discouraging of limited English folks.”

A bright spot for him? How people on both sides of the election could be cordial.

“I did my shift … outside an early voting site in southeast Wake County in a semi-rural area. It is a mixed area racially, and the people I talked to there said they thought voter preferences were split right down the middle. Unlike in the African American community area I had been in, there were Trump hats and people openly supporting right-wing candidates along with those talking up Democrats and liberal causes, but no tension or intimidation at all,” he said.

Despite the work by Greiner, Midgley and many others in the Tar Heel State, it went red and, with it, shocked many in the country who believed Clinton had the election wrapped up. It also shone a light on the intricacies of this country’s electoral system and the normally invisible, yet complex issues that affect it.

“It was a very positive experience with other people, but not with the system,” Midgley said.