10,000 pizzas to 43 states: How pizza drivers became Election Day heroes

If your timeline was teeming with pizza pics yesterday, you’re not alone. Pizza to the Polls, a nonprofit started by three friends in Portland, Ore., in 2016, helped facilitate the delivery of more than 10,000 free pizzas to thousands of voters braving lines across the nation. “It was … crazy,” Scott Duncombe, one of Pizza to the Polls’s three founders tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I might have to go on a pizza hiatus now.”

Pizza to the Polls’s mission statement reads: “Americans are hungry for democracy and are turning out in record numbers to vote. But that means long lines and sometimes empty stomachs, which might discourage these brave patriots from performing their civic duty. Fortunately Pizza to the Polls is here to deliver the one thing that pairs so perfectly with freedom: piping hot ‘za”

And deliver they did. According to the group’s calculations, which it periodically tweeted out Tuesday, the organization raised $376,301 dollars during the midterm elections, sending 10,005 pizzas to 576 polling places across 43 states. Thanks to the many celebrity tweets and donations, it turned out equal roughly 13 pizzas per minute.

Duncombe — an admitted pizza devotee — said the idea for the movement came from a conversation he had with his wife, Katie Harlow, and friend Noah Manger ahead of the 2016 election. “We were texting about the long vote lines and wondering if we could do anything, so we decided to send some pizza to some lines in Ohio,” he says. “We just called the pizzeria and said, ‘Can you do this?’ And they agreed. People seemed to love it, so we started a Twitter account where people could donate, and we woke up on election day in 2016 with $10,000 in donations.”

By the election’s end two years ago, the team had raised more than $40,000 and sent over 2,000 pizzas to polling sites nationwide. But this year, the pizza gifting reached a new level. The group more than quadrupled the number of donations and more than doubled the number of pizzas, leaving them with more than $150,000 of yet-to-be-donated pizza. The three friends — all full-time employees at the automation startup Zapier — mostly rely on a pizza delivery app called Slice for ordering. But yesterday, holed up in a room they called “pizza HQ,” they found themselves fielding some confused calls from drivers.

“I encourage the drivers to go up to people in line and hand out boxes unless the polling place has volunteers who take the lead,” Duncombe tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I spoke to a pizza delivery guy in Louisville yesterday who was like, ‘Wait, but you’re not here. I need you to sign.’ And then finally it clicked for him, and he was like, ‘Oh, cool, these are for free. I’m just going to give them out.'”

Duncombe and the team — which also includes roughly 20 other volunteers who are mostly friends — scan Twitter and Instagram for pictures of people reporting long voting lines and, after confirming that the line and polling place is real, send them anywhere from two to two dozen pizzas. In an email to Yahoo Lifestyle, Slice — the pizza delivery app that partners with Pizza to the Polls — sent a list of the regions where the most Pizza to the Polls orders occurred.

Highest on the list was Georgia, with 98 pizza orders, followed closely by New York at 82 and then California with 80. “We got a call from a Pizza Hut in California, and they were like, ‘Hey, it’s 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and there are two of us here. It’s going to take forever to make this many,” Duncombe says. “So then we just told them, ‘Make as many as you can, and we split up the order.'”

According to Duncombe, the store that handled the most pizza orders also happened to be one of the smallest — a local shop in Whittier, Calif., called Pikey’s Pizza. Rudy Calderon, one of two employees scheduled to work Tuesday, says when the first order came in, it caught them off guard. “The first order was for 12 pizzas, and that freaked us out because there were only two of us,” Calderon tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “When I went to deliver them, I was a bit lost. I had no idea what was going on.”

But as the orders to the same polling place kept coming in, Calderon and his co-worker started to realize what was happening. “I thought it was going to be a normal slow Tuesday, but it ended up getting really crazy,” says Calderon. “I was supposed to be there 11 a.m. to 5:30, but I ended up staying until 10 p.m. to make sure everything went smoothly.”

By the end of the day, Calderon and Pikey’s had delivered 86 pizzas to a single polling place in Whittier, a process that took seven trips. Although it got stressful at times, Calderon says the looks on people’s faces made it worthwhile. “Everyone was thanking me, and a couple people were giving me high-fives down the line,” he tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “It was definitely the most interesting and busy day I’ve had.” Back at work Wednesday, Calderon says he was happy to get the business but is hoping today will be slower.

While Calderon was seemingly the busiest pizza delivery man, he wasn’t the only one to be getting props. On Instagram and Twitter, people waiting to vote shared jubilant pictures of the scene when the pizza arrived, with captions thanking them for bringing much-needed food. “Pizza delivered and enjoyed up and down party lines,” tweeted Cynthia Kearns, next to a picture of a Domino’s delivery woman. “Thank you!”

As for Duncombe and his team, they too got to partake in a free pizza party, thanks to local Portland pizzerias who turned the tables and donated pizza to them. “It’s pretty meta,” Dumcombe says. Now, a day after the election, it’s up to his team to determine where to send the next pizzas with the remaining donations. But even when the current funds run out, Duncombe says there’s no plan to stop: “As long as the dough keeps coming, we will keep sending.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• These are the women who made history on election night

• ‘I needed to put my ballot where my mouth was’: Durham native living in D.C. travels all night to vote, and Twitter cheers her on

• Alabama gubernatorial candidate’s 5-year-old son shows just how exhausted he is by his father’s 396-day campaign

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