As I mentioned the past two Mondays, my town had a special election last week to try to pass a special override of Massachusetts Prop 2 ½ in order to increase funding for our schools, first responders, senior and veterans services. It was almost 100F outside and we had no AC inside. I ended up with heatrash blisters on my arm, sweated so much I can do testimonials for my deodorant, and staggered out 15hrs after I arrived saddened to learn it had failed. I have two observations I want to share here tonight:
First: A friend crunched some numbers the day after and framed it in a way I think we should be doing in ALL elections: The vote was 45% yes, 55% no. However, over half of registered voters DID NOT VOTE, meaning that only 20% of registered voters felt our children, educators, first responders, seniors and veterans mattered enough to fund appropriately even if it meant a tax increase. One in five eligible voters. The rest either said no or didn’t give a damn.
I’ve been in a funk thinking about that. The overriding sentiment among No voters was that “the city needs to learn to live within its means”. So I have questions:
1. Should I stop donating to Food Pantries, because people utilizing them should be eating within their budgets and not expecting someone to feed them?
2. Should we tell people asking for financial help they need to adjust their expenses and expectations to their economic reality?
3. Should we tell multichild families they should have planned your family size economically and had fewer children if they didn’t have an income guaranteed to support them all for 20 years?
4. Should we ban gofundme campaigns because really, if you cannot afford [medical care, funerals, replacing your house if it burns down, etc] then that’s your own fault and you shouldn’t expect others to help you out?
Obviously I don’t think ANY of that should happen. But it makes me sad that 80% of my city either believes that, or didn’t care enough to show up. And I suspect that 80% will be upset when, to mix metaphors, the leopards show up to eat THEIR faces.
Second: I’ve been an election worker since November 2020. In general, most people are reasonably civil and polite. Here in my town, we have an annual census form every January and if you do not fill it out, you get put on the Inactive Voter list. Note: NOT purged, just marked inactive since maybe you moved or something. So when you show up to vote, the checkin software flags you as Inactive and you have to go to the Clerk and show an ID of some sort with your name and the address we have on file for you. It can be a license, a utility bill, bank statement, etc. We’ve had people wrangle their online banking to get a statement up so we can see the address… we’re really generous as long as it meets the state criteria.
This year, TWICE I had to call for help from the Election Department staff when a voter got cranky, and I know other precincts did as well. In one case the cranky dude told the poor election clerk asking for an ID “You want my ID? FIFTEEN. YEARS. ON. ACTIVE. DUTY. is my ID”. Well, thank you for your service Sir but you still need to show an ID. I suspect this voter would expect anyone who didn’t look “like they were American” be required to show ID, yanno? In the second case, Mister Inactive Voter claimed he’d “been voting for fifty years here and not once had he ever been marked inactive and why now? Was this a plot to and I quote gin up a yes vote?” In both cases, our phenomenal Elections staff swooped in and took over and got the voter taken care of.
Lastly, I had a cranky person mark her ballot and come to put it in the tabulator. Yes, these are Dominion machines. It took two tries because she didn’t know how to push it in until it caught the autofeed. When I said thank you for voting, she said “Whatever. All of these should be hand-counted, anyway, instead of these machines”. Say what now? You want us at 8pm after FOURTEEN HOURS in a heat wave sit and HAND COUNT TEN THOUSAND BALLOTS? In what way will that be MORE accurate, and if that’s what you think then why TF aren’t you working this election, bish?
So. This tells me that the November election is going to be ugly for poll workers. If you are able to BE one, please consider finding out if you can help either as an election worker or as an observer, because we’re going to need all the smart, capable people we can to get through this.
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