NY: Democracy – Registrants Need Not Apply
Election officials in upstate New York have found a new threat to the democratic process: a 71-year-old man handing out ballots.
According to CBS6 Albany, a man on New York’s registry was working the polls on Election Day until residents complained and the Montgomery County Board of Elections removed him around 8 p.m. The county sheriff said no law appeared to have been broken. The county said it followed every state guideline for hiring poll workers. Nobody claimed anything happened at the polling place except that people voted. Still, a state senator called it “disturbing” and promised there is “work to do.”
Really?!?! The people who come to a polling place to vote are, by law, at least 18. Children cannot vote. What, exactly, was the risk? That he might hand an “I Voted” sticker to an adult?
This is only the latest stop on the tour. Earlier this year, after a registrant in Fresno tried to run for city council, California legislators rushed out a bill to bar everyone on the registry from running for state or local office. That bill died in committee, but the effort hasn’t gone away. In Wisconsin, a state representative fired her campaign manager, and the state party removed him as vice chair of its Latino Caucus, the moment it was reported that he was on the registry. Ten months of work on the campaign, apparently without incident, didn’t count for anything.
So to recap: registrants can’t run for office, can’t help someone else run for office, and can’t even hand out ballots.
The message is hard to miss. Lawmakers want people who have served their sentences be good citizens. Then they lock the doors to every room where citizenship actually happens. Pushing someone out of civic life doesn’t protect anyone. It just guarantees the only voices left in the room are the ones writing the next restriction. Maybe that’s what this is all about?
Discover more from Florida Action Committee (FAC)
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Although I stand with those people who try and get these important jobs, I myself do NOT want to be in the limelight. Once the claim is made that someone complained, then the news catches on, then here we are again on the tv being berated. AND, they always like to “Fluff up” the story and make it WAY worse that is really was.
It is like the funny things we used to type on here when I first came on FAC. We made a silly list like “Driving while registered”. On one had that is funny and on the other it is quite sad.
Time for a letter writing campaign. Most likely no one knew this person was a forced to register citizen until someone said something. For a state senator to call it disturbing is ridiculous.
If a politician contradicts their own rhetoric, would the public hold them accountable to their terms like they did the PFR? Banishment can go both ways in public eyesight too; it’s a sad world we live in. Justice and public opinion get mixed to many times.