MADAWASKA – The George W. Bush and John Kerry campaigns spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Tuesday’s election, but the most effective campaign may prove to be the least costly: the grass-roots effort going on in small municipalities all over the country.

In the St. John Valley, volunteers were scurrying about for weeks up until Election Day.

They register residents to vote; they run after absentee ballots; and they give voters rides back and forth from the polling stations.

There was a lot of interest in Tuesday’s elections, even from Canadians. Radio Canada, the French side of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. network, was in Fort Kent and Madawaska Tuesday morning. They talked with locals in coffee shops about the election between Bush and Kerry.

Later in the morning, a live television program from Edmundston, New Brunswick, caught the Madawaska landscape in the background. While talking with two local reporters, the program also had a direct line with a French-speaking reporter in Louisiana.

Local volunteers uncovered some interesting tidbits in their adventures.

Bertha Theriault, 89, of Madawaska had never voted until this election. She didn’t know how to go about it until a Madawaska volunteer came to her home and assisted her to register and vote by absentee ballot.

“I was never very interested in politics, and I didn’t know much about it,” she said Tuesday afternoon. “I’m pretty proud of voting. I’m happy about it.

“Maybe I’ll lose my vote, maybe not,” she said. “They came to see me, and they knew I wasn’t registered.”

Absentee numbers were high throughout the St. John Valley. There were also 294 at Fort Kent and 225 at Van Buren.

Former state Sen. Judy Paradis said Madawaska Democratic Headquarters has been open six weeks. Nearly 75 volunteers were involved in the effort to get people registered, the delivery of absentee ballots and running around after voters Tuesday.

“Tres, tres bien [very, very good],” she said when asked about the effort in the St. John Valley. “There are still a lot who have not voted and we are working on it.”

They’ve even found Americans living in Canada, and had a dozen of them vote in Tuesday’s election.

“People with dual citizenship can vote in the United States,” Paradis said.

A volunteer at the Fort Kent Democratic Headquarters, Louis Moreau, told of going to the Mountainview Apartments on Monday to deliver an absentee ballot. By the time the afternoon was done, he had others.

“The lady had friends, and they wanted to vote also,” Moreau said Tuesday afternoon. “It started with one ballot, and by the end of the afternoon we had 11 people from the apartments who voted.”

Otherwise, Moreau said, maybe one or two would have gone to the polling station on Tuesday.

The numbers of voters in the St. John Valley showed that the effort was working.

At St. Agatha Tuesday afternoon, officials were only 31 votes away from their record 420-voter turnout of 2000. Four hours of voting remained at the time.

“There is usually a rush after supper,” Town Manager Ryan Pelletier said. “There was a line to the outside this morning, and there is always one or two voters in the voting booths.”

At Fort Kent they had 1,700 votes through the lines at 4 p.m. They were still shy by 500 voters to exceed the 2,200 number of 2000.