H oping local action will prevent widespread voter apathy on Election Day, a group of local grandmothers mailed the last of 10,000 postcards encouraging people to go to the polls.

The cards target women in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District who voted in 2008 but not in 2010.

Four thousand yellow postcards went into the mail Monday in Topsham, joining 6,000 others already mailed from elsewhere in the state.

“Preferably, we’d like for them to vote for the president,” said Jay McCreight, a Harpswell woman who helped form the postcard steering committee. “But we really just want them to get out and vote.”

McCreight is part of “Grandmothers for Obama,” an outgrowth of Maine Women for Obama.

The group started out as a “calling party,” a group of Obama supporters who convene in someone’s living room for tea and snacks and to drum support for the president’s re-election with phone call pep talks to prospective voters.

But the idea for a postcard mailer campaign allowed for a personal message delivered to a core audience.

Waving small signs and toting large yellow buckets full of bundled postcards, the mass of matrons wrought a mild level of havoc in the small, narrow post office driveway as they made their way to the outgoing mail boxes.

Some drivers, unaware of the group’s focus, beeped horns and glared as they jockeyed for parking spaces.

The grandmothers paid them little heed.

Others asked what was the ruckus. One man, when told it was not so much a protest as an encouragement, beamed from beneath his walrus mustache and sunglasses.

“Good for them,” he said. “Everyone should vote. It’s an American right.”

All of the card signers are grandmothers or matriarchal surrogates who care for young children.

“Because it’s a personal message rather than just (bulk-mailed) ‘spam,’ maybe it’ll help get past the ambivalence and the apathy,” McCreight said. “It was a small group of volunteers who got together and wanted to do something to get out the vote for President Obama.”

The cards express support for Obama’s stance on women’s rights, preventive health care and his effort to reverse “a miserable economy” which the group says is caused in part by taxation and spending policies endorsed by former President George W. Bush and a Republican controlled Congress.

Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is the largest east of the Mississippi River. It includes all of the central, northern and eastern parts of the state, as well as the cities of Lewiston-Auburn and Bangor. It extends north and west of Portland, and north and east of Augusta to the Canadian border.

Designed to be personal appeals, the cards are handaddressed and include space for a personal message from the mailer. Although the cards will be mailed to voters in the 2nd District, group networking has spread the effort of posting them throughout the region. They have been dropped into mailboxes in Kittery, Camden, Mechanic Falls and beyond.

Printing the cards cost $300 and was paid for by the steering committee members — McCreight, Jean Konzal of Harpswell and Patricia Fuchs of Orr’s Island — as well as other volunteers and Grandmothers for Obama members.

Postage largely was funded by donations as well, and each grandmother was asked to donate 10 stamps at a time.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com