the count, how we do small-town democracy

a piece of paper with a few lists of numbers handwritten on it. Some are circled.

We’re revving up for town meeting day (Saturday) and as someone on the Board of Civil Authority (the chair, actually) there are a few little pre-voting tasks. Voting is on Tuesday. One of them is checking the tabulator. This involves sending sample ballots through and making sure the machine counts correctly and operates correctly. It’s a bit of a slog but also kind of interesting. Our town has four main ballots which everyone votes: presidential (pick a party), local (i.e. the school region which includes three towns), and the town. The town staff fill out fake ballots including stuff like slightly under- or over-filled circles, a few write-ins, and then they go through the tabulator. This is pretty straightforward though there is a bit of “Check to make sure this number on this little tag is the same as I’m writing in the book when I unlock this part of the machine” stuff which feels a little performative but maybe that’s because we’ve been really lucky to not have people angrily contesting any of our elections.

The next part, however, is to hand count the ten ballots in each category. This seems like it would be simple but in point of fact, it’s weirdly hard. The candidate ballots are straightforward. But then there are local funding issues, questions similar to “Should we give $1000 to the food shelf?” and similar. This is a two-sided ballot in which the numbering starts at 2, continues to 3 and 4, and then hops to eight, and then counts up to 25. So twenty-one separate items on which people vote yes or no. I count them. A representative from the “other party” (I am registered as a Democratic candidate as a JP, I’m planning to run as an Independent this year) also counts them. If our numbers don’t match–and in this picture you can see that I’ve boxed the ones where our counts did not match–we count them again. Only one of these non-matching counts was mine, but I was really hoping for zero.

Meanwhile there is an adorable child nearby doing adorable (but noisy) child things and it’s like my kryptonite “Count these numbers while you hear random noises.” Also it’s late, not in relative terms but late in the day for me to be doing brain stuff. It takes about ninety minutes, time that is definitely after the town clerk’s usual work day would end and he’s remarkably gracious about it. At the end of it, we’ve checked that our numbers match both each other’s and the ones the machine spits out. The sample ballots get locked in some special place where they sit for sixty days in case someone wants to check our work.

I’ve been dialing back a little bit of my participation in non-work stuff lately. Having a new job has made me want to carve out my volunteer time differently. I’m stepping down after my term on the American Library Association Council–a little more about that here–and I’m stepping down from my position on the Conservation Commission after eight years. I strongly believe that small towns only work, only get to keep working, because of the many volunteers who do the small jobs that in other, larger places would be done by paid staff. Whenever I meet new people in town I’m one of those people who asks how they’re going to get involved with the town. If they don’t have ideas I can usually suggest some. I look forward to voting day(s) every year. Not only am I usually running for Justice of the Peace (that happens in November) but I get to see most of my neighbors and do some quick catch up with them. Town Meeting Day and Voting Day show us in all our winter gear, not quite used to being around people or being outside our winter dens. I get to wear a little name tag and help make democracy easier for people. I’m glad to be able to do it.

town meeting day

breakfast on a sunny day

Sort of dumbly excited about Town Meeting day. I spaced the date last year and had work plans by the time I remembered what the date was. For someone of my political bent, the only sort of democracy I really like is direct democracy and town meeting is IT. This year has been lively in town. The town manager was removed from his position amidst a lot of rumors that can’t be confirmed or denied because everyone can’t legally disclose what happened. That same town manager (who maybe is an okay person but I didn’t like him much as a town manager) is running for selectboard which is sort of crazy. There’s a schism in town between the no-new-or-higher-taxes crowd who I consider more conservative and the “Our town is awesome let’s keep it that way” crowd which I’m more aligned with. I even became the “social media manager” of the Randolph We Love page on facebook which is about as far as I go in getting politically involved outside of my library activism. As a renter I don’t even pay taxes in this town directly, but I’d be happy to chip in a bit more to keep the library functioning as well as it does and keep the opera house open. This is a great little town.

So I’m at home the night before the meeting making cookies for the “meet the town” social hour before the meeting begins at 10 am. There are a few places online to follow the statewide happenings including VPRs page of updates and a site they link to TMDVT which is a simple tagged content aggregator. I have the day off of work and a hot dog party to go to in the evening so tomorrow will be a big day which I’m sure will be in interestingly marked contrast to SXSW which is coming up at the end of the week in Austin Texas.

class and classy

It used to be a running joke in college that anyone who called anything “classy” was automatically bestowing sort of the opposite adjective to it; that classy was a word used by a person who had no class. Or used by us trying to be ironic.

I’ve been thinking about class a lot in the past few weeks. We just had our town meeting on Tuesday. I took a few photos. I like living in Vermont because there’s more of a sense that we’re in this together, whatever “this” happens to be. As of a few months ago, Randolph started charging people to drop off recycling at the transfer station. We’ve always paid for trash but recycling was free. I thought this was as it should be, small financial incentives to do the right thing. On the other hand, it was costing the town to get rid of the recycling and the so-called “tipping fees” were actually subsidizing the recycling program as recycling got more expensive to process. There was some discussion of this including one lady who said that she took a bag of recycling and it cost “only fifty cents” the easy implication being if you were going to not recycle over a mere fifty cents, there was something pretty well wrong with you. I think this ignores what it’s like to really live on a tight budget or make tough choices about where your money goes (for the record, I do neither, this is a bit of an intellectual exercise for me) and I have to admit that I’ve been letting my recycling pile up, which is ridiculous.

There was also some back and forth about the Randolph Food Shelf which was asking for something like $1500 this year to help with expenses. A young woman who was pretty new to town meeting was surprised to see people walking out of the food shelf with cakes because, well, she was on a budget and she wasn’t buying cake. She asked about it. There followed a long discussion of how the food shelf system works (cakes are day old, or donated) and who it serves (anyone who says they need it, no questions asked) and it seemed like most people in town were okay with the whole system. In a town of about 4800 people, 350 people had used the food shelf at some point in the last year. Ten percent of Vermonters have used a food shelf at some time. It didn’t look like the food shelf was going to have a difficult time getting their money. Good.

I’ve been travelling a lot on planes lately which is getting more unpleasant as the airlines find ways to save costs. I’m not complaining as much as stating a fact. I’m aware I can stay home. One day, perhaps I will. In addition to charging for checked bags, United now calls the first ten or so rows in the non-first class part of the plane “premium” seating (since they have a few inches of extra legroom) and tries to charge you more to sit in them. It’s not unusual to see a plane taking off with ten empty rows and everyone else smushed into the back part of the plane. After takeoff, people try to move into better seats and they’re rebuffed. Air travel has always come with severe class distinctions: from the order of loading the plane, to the silly curtain in-between first and second class, to additional bathrooms for first class travellers with severe exhortations from the flight attendants to only use your own bathrooms.

The stewardesses on my last flight — as I was smooshed in the back somewhere, but I don’t care too much since I’m short and can pretty much fit anywhere — actually told people it wasn’t fair for them to move forward since other people had paid extra to sit in those special seats. Ignoring the obvious “Well, who created this stupid system?” follow-up question. Then they said something about not using the forward rest rooms because of “safety.” Since it’s pretty well illegal for us to ignore anything they say because of “safety” this is a nice way to make weird arbitrary distinctions and make them unarguable. And yes I know you’re not supposed to gather by the cockpit, but as far as I know, there are no safety ramifications for a non-first class passenger to pee or not pee in a first class toilet. Are there?

Of course, people who can afford air travel in the US are often already in a privileged class, so it’s amusing to get this object lessons in how it feels to be someone who gets things denied to them just because of how much money you have, or are willing to spend. I’m glad I can take it or leave it.