Worried about elections? Do something about it
You don’t want to miss chapter on reporter extraordinaire Maury Thompson
By Ken Tingley
If we all believe in free elections, here are some changes we should consider:
- Let’s make Election Day a national holiday so there is no excuse for not voting.
- Let’s give a small tax deduction if you volunteer to be an inspector at your local polling place or just pay more for a day of work.
- Let’s have every school have a full day of programs each Election Day devoted to civics and how our government and elections work.
That’s for the long term. In the meantime, we can each do our part.
Mary Pliska, a voting inspector in Saratoga County, recently made a plea to me.
She said more poll workers are needed and asked me to make a pitcher for more volunteers. If you vote, you know these folks. You see them every time you go to the polls.. They have you sign in, hand you a ballot, direct you toward the machine and answer any questions you might have. There is not a lot of heavy lifting and I hear there my be free pizza.
What you may not know is that these folks can work up to 16 hours on Election Day.
Mary says there is a shortage of workers on the horizon. Many of the poll workers - mostly retired folks - are not coming back. Those long days take their toll, some have passed away and now there is the stress of being accused of election fraud.
We’ve heard a lot about the sanctity of our elections recently and some have even questioned their legitimacy despite the work of honest and committed poll inspectors. Most just wanted to do their part, pick up a little extra money and be part of the democratic process. I doubt it was the free pizza.
I wonder now if some are afraid they will be targeted without cause.
It has gotten ugly out there.
That makes it more important than ever for the next generation to volunteer to be an inspector.
Mary says the pay in Saratoga County is about $210 for a 16-hour day. New inspectors are also paid $50 if they complete the 2 1/2-hour training.
But Mary reminded me, it is not about the money.
“It is not a job,” Mary wrote me. “It is a fulfillment of a civic responsibility.”
When Mary asked me to help, I asked her if she could get me the information to make it easy for people to volunteer. When she called Fulton County, they were ecstatic that she was trying to help out. So were most of the other counties. But one county said they did not want Mary to list their phone number even though it is public information and not everyone has access to a computer. Some might not even know there was an election board.
So I looked up the number myself and included it here. So if you want to volunteer as an election inspector here are the numbers for the local counties. It is a chance to do your part and stand up for democracy:
Warren County - 518 761-6458 or 518 761-6459
Albany County - 518 487-5060.
Saratoga Coounty - 518 885-2249.
Washington County - 518 746-2180.
Mary thanked me for my help at the end of the email and said she was just thinking about Benjamin Franklin.
“The newspaper is the thing that helped shape our democracy,” Mary wrote. “The newspaper and the post office made the dissemination of information possible in the infancy of our country, information important to citizen participation. Keep the faith.”
We need more citizens like Mary Pliska.
Smuggling books
Apparently, former Post-Star reporter Thom Randall liked my book. He contacted me on Tuesday to see if he could get four more books (he had bought two over the weekend).
I happened to be heading to Albany for lunch, so I arranged to meet with Thom at the Barnes and Noble in Colonie. Tom was waiting for me in the coffee shop where I brought in my backpack full of books.
I signed the books for Thom and we regaled each other with newspaper war stories.
The one thing about Thom, he always seemed to get himself into odd situations.
As he was leaving the Barnes and Noble with six of my books under his arm, he was stopped by store security who wanted to see a receipt.
Thom explained the book swap, but ultimately, his best argument was that Barnes and Noble does not sell my book - yet - so Thom tried to convince them they should. After all, six were just sold in their coffee shop.
Maury’s story
If you have been a long-time Post-Star reader then you are familiar with the work of reporter Maury Thompson. Maury retired in 2017, but is now back writing for the newspaper. That does not surprise me at all. Maury was born to be a reporter, but that is not the way it always was. Chapter 4 of “The Last American Newspaper” is titled “Maury” and it starts this way:
Maury Thompson was one of those guys who couldn’t seem to find his niche in the world.
He admitted he was an “oddball” growing up in Pennsylvania and eventually relocated to Ticonderoga in upstate New York after working summers at a YMCA summer camp on Lake George. A year out of high school, he married a local girl and had three children in five years. The marriage ended in divorce.
Along the way, Thompson sold encyclopedias door-to-door, wrote radio commercials for an auto dealer and hustled as a short order cook at multiple diners and restaurants while raising a family.
Along the way, he also became a great newspaper reporter. After reading the chapter about Maury, I think you will have renewed appreciation for him.
Tweet of the Day
No longer involved in government as an elected official, I became an election inspector.
The shortage, especially among Democrats, had always been apparent. I had lost much of my interest in campaigning, political speeches, events and the entire process leading up to an election. But service is in my genes. I choose to work a16-hour day. They can be brutally long, but I have come to appreciate the lengths our Boards of Elections go to insure safe, secure and sane elections. I encourage more people to get involved and have been successful in getting an additional three Greenwich Dems trained. I'm moving on to increasing that number throughout Washington County.
Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Jamie Raskin. It was published on YouTube on September 12:
https://youtu.be/5KBAJik9_SQ
Starting at 11:00 (https://youtu.be/5KBAJik9_SQ?t=660), Brian Tyler Cohen brings up Shaye Moss and Lady Ruby -- the Georgia election workers who were so thoroughly maligned and harassed by Trump and his followers, and Jamie Raskin responds.
BTC points out that the online vitriol directed at Shaye Moss creates an environment in which it's harder to attract honest citizens to do this essential work of democracy -- poll workers.
I transcribed use a part of this segment:
BTC: It's not just that it happened. It's that now it's going to be that much more difficult to recruit other people to do the right thing, to do what these people were doing, which was just their civic duty and showing up and being elections workers, something that we desperately need to do, and then it creates this vacuum that's then filled by bad actors, and so that was...
JR: "Well, Shaye Moss is an extraordinary representative of American electoral democracy in action. I mean, we don't have a democracy if we don't have Shae Moss and people like her, who are willing to wake up early, and get down to the polling place, and check people in, and, um, you know, make sure that people are getting their absentee ballots and explaining how the system works. I mean, she is the face of how American democracy works like Donald Trump is the face of how American plutocracy and autocracy and kleptocracy and theocracy work, through all of his evil designs. So that was a remarkable moment too. I agree with you."