Gloria Ferris

Any of you who know me well knows that one of my passions is getting people to vote and to make sure those votes count.  So this year, I decided to take my dedication to this cause one step further.  I signed up to be a  poll worker.  Little did I know that my first time out of the box would be as the presiding judge of a precinct.  I’ve had my training and my poll worker manual is ready as well so tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. I head out the door to begin my own kind of marathon–a fourteen-hour day that hopefully will go smoothly .  Tonight was our organizational meeting and the bottom line for all of us there was that the voters will have a good experience voting at our polling place. If enthusiasm and eagerness mean anything, we are going to be a winning team.  I believe that unless we as a group work to put trust and integrity of the system back into the equation, voting stats will continue to decline.  We need to turn this around now and make sure that we VOTE!

So now, my poll workers are in place and we are ready for you the voters to vote.  We will be there tomorrow bright and early–the polls open at 6:30 a.m. and we will be there until 7:30 p.m. for you to vote.  If you have not already voted absentee, please come and see us.  We need your voice and your vote.  Expect the Board of Elections to do it better than they did in May. My fellow pollworkers who received the training and worked the polls in May say that already things are looking better than before so let’s be optimistic.  Believe me, I have ideas on how things should be done and I intend to talk about them to whomever will listen after the election.  But right now, I need one election under my belt before I make any suggestions.

When I think of the elections around the world where people literally risk their lives to cast a vote, and then I read in the newspapers that our voting stats fluctuate with the weather, I am truly sad.  Are we so far away from those patriots who risked their lives so that we would not sing “God Save Queen”  but instead we would sing “My country ’tis of thee”?  Have we forgotten the freedom marches that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led and   all the lives lost so that the Voting Rights Act would become law and that it would be enforced? Have we forgotten the soldiers and sailors that have given their lives so that our country would remain free and that other countries would have the right to vote?  Yes, early voting has a place and yes, we should use it, but is that enough of a reason not to take the time to vote tomorrow?  I think not.

Lately, we have heard much about Ohio being a bellwether state.  I think that we should take the opportunity to raise the bar on how many people vote in a given election and see if other states are up to the challenge.  So whether you are Republican, Democrat, or Independent, please vote.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Cleveland, developing community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.