Political participation

Much of my research has something to do with political or civic participation. I've written about participation in state environmental permitting processes, local zoning processes, even about community based participation in neighborhood beautification projects.

However, until this summer, I've done little research on participation in voting. I figured that the political scientists have that covered and any good scholar tries to find the areas that no one else is paying attention to. This summer I conducted a pilot study on community involvement with the help of young people from our local environmental justice crew, ASPIRE, and Northeastern University. The project had many goals, the most important of which was testing whether using young people as surveyors would work.

Anyway, a few of the questions had to do with voting behavior. I was not surprised to find that about a half of subjects in our study voted in the previous election. It was a landmark election and bitterly fought. Participation in that election was fairly high. In East Boston, over 50% of registered voters came out that day.

This summer I also volunteered for the first time in an electoral campaign. In the past I have helped developed policy platforms and similar things. This time I was in the thick of it. I was the bookkeeper, I went out doorknocking with the candidate, I helped keep the computer equipment working. On election day, for the first time ever, I worked in a poll.

My job was to be a poll checker. Basically, I sit behind the poll worker and listen for who comes into vote. If they are on my list, I check them off. Three other campaigns had poll checkers too. It was a long and not terribly exciting day.

However, what I witnessed was just astounding. I saw our poll worker allow two registered Republicans vote in this Democratic primary. I had to call our campaign lawyer and he had to come in and educate the Warden and the poll workers. Apparently, the poll worker was told in the last primary to allow Republicans to declare a different party and allow them to vote. In Massachusetts, only the unenrolled can do that.

The poll worker for my precinct also had some problem with her eyes. I suspect either cataracts or maybe glaucoma. In any event, she had a hard time actually reading the book with the list of registered voters. Several times she checked off the wrong voter and had to be corrected. The Warden and the other poll workers tried to get her to let another poll worker do that, but she was having none of it. She made several mistakes that took time to correct. It was amazing.

The candidate I was supporting did not win. These problems are definitely not the reason for her loss. However, I am disturbed that something that is supposed to be so important to our political identity as a democracy is conducted with such a cavalier attitude. I don't expect perfection. Mistakes happen and these poll workers work 13-14 hour days - and that's if nothing goes wrong. But these people are paid to do this work. And good money too. It is too much to ask for poll workers to not be blind and know the basics of who gets to vote in a primary?

I had tried to volunteer once to be a poll worker after I moved back to Boston. The city put out a notice that they needed volunteers. The city never called me back. I didn't think much about it. When I went to vote in the next election, I noticed that the poll site seemed to be overstaffed. There were something like 12 people for a single precinct. I guess they didn't need the volunteers in my neighborhood. But now I wonder, who chooses the volunteers? How are the assigned to the polls? And how does a woman who is half blind manage to become the clerk of a polling station?

Breaking News: College students not doing something stupid

The school year started out with several stories of students doing something so unbelievably stupid that you wonder how they managed to get into college in the first place. At my own university, two freshman were arrested before classes even started for possession with the intent to distribute. How do we know they intended to distribute? They shouted out their apartment window to a person on the sidewalk that they had drugs to sell. Unfortunately for them, there were two plains clothes police officers on the sidewalk as well. This story was not only widely discussed locally, it was included in NPR's news quiz show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. These two students didn't even make it to the first day of classes; they were promptly expelled.

And just today, a 19 year old MIT student was arrested for bringing a hoax device into the airport. This young woman walked into Boston Logan airport wearing a sweater with a circuit board connected to 9-volt battery glued onto it. She was also holding what looked like putty and was apparently acting a little bit suspicious. Her excuse for wearing this to the airport: she was on her way to career day and wanted to get noticed.

There's a small part of me that feels a little smug. You could characterize the Northeastern students actions as entrepreneurial. You might sympathetically conjecture that they were trying to raise money to buy their books. It might be a stretch, but not unreasonable. The MIT student, on the other hand, was clearly not thinking.

But, the point I want to make is that the vast majority of students are, in fact, well behaved citizens. The majority of the 200,000-250,000 students who live here at least 9 months out of the year are not selling drugs, are not vomiting on our streets from overconsumption of alcohol, and are not testing our homeland security methods. A significant number of them are taking our orders at local restaurants, hanging up the overpriced merchandise at our favorite retail stores, volunteering in our local schools, participating in the Charles River Cleanup, and a whole host of other good things. They are also spending their money here, a much needed source of revenue that us residents often forget that we rely on to keep our streets paved.

The universities do need to do a better job managing their student's off campus behavior. But, more importantly, the universities should be promoting the good things that their students are doing. And our local media should be covering it. Hundreds of thousands of students graduate with a variety of degrees and certificates from these schools. The vast majority of them spent their time in Boston doing their schoolwork, working crappy, low-wage jobs, and living fairly uneventful lives. A good number of them do some pretty wonderful things. It's too bad that a few boneheads make the rest of them, and the universities they attend, look bad.

Public civility, or lack thereof

Yesterday in the Boston Globe, one of my favorite authors published an op-ed that really struck me. Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked and The Ugly Stepsister) rambled on a bit trying to draw parallels between the story in Wicked and modern day life. I was drawn to this particular statement:

"Now I find the lack of civility and the evaporation of respect for different points of view to be rampant all over the political spectrum, including the soapbox I comfortably occupy."

This pretty much sums up the discourse on one local blog as it relates to a special election happening here in Eastie. However, I would add that this lack of civility is not just found in political discourse, but in every day life.

Yesterday morning (after reading Maquire's piece) I was at the bank. While I waited for my banker to make some copies of something for me, I could hear a conflict brewing at one of the teller windows. Before even turning my head, a young woman started screaming at the supervisor, accusing the teller of being disrepectful to her, cutting her off, etc. She began throwing the f-bomb around like it was going out of style. The branch manager had to stop what he was doing to tell her that such language and behavior will not be tolerated. As it turned out, whatever this young lady needed could not be done at the teller window. Having just been to that teller just a few minutes before, I must admit that I refuse to believe that the problem was with the teller. More likely, the irate customer was overworked, overtired, stressed out, and obviously short-tempered (giving her the benefit of the doubt - she may have been just a bitch).

I too share Maguire's lament in the lack of public civility. I guess the question is, what do you do about it. In this case, the branch manager and teller supervisor stood their ground in insisting that the customer not harass or otherwise mistreat the teller. On the blog I referred to earlier, the blogger has started moderating comments and refuses to post any that include personal attacks. I think more like this needs to be done to impose some modicum of civility back into public life.

Ugly children have a chance after all

Today I was walking down Cambridge Street in the West End and overheard the following snippet of conversation:

"He was funny looking as a kid, but ended up being a good looking guy after all."

So, there's hope for all of the awkward, funny looking children that you might be raising (or might be yourself). And even if you persist in less-than-hunkhood, you can always do a Bill Gates and just become fabulously rich and powerful.