A local district in Vermont had its school budget fail by 60 votes. They blamed it on low voter turnout, which they blamed on vote-by-mail. The ability to vote by mail resulted in low turnout which put the kibosh on the budget.
Is vote by mail vote suppression?
No. According to local experts, vote-by-mail confused the voters. A problem you could eliminate by asking everyone to vote in person like they’ve been doing for centuries, but no, we can’t do that. We have to do this.
Without unanimous agreement from its member towns, the Otter Valley district could not conduct a mail-in election. So even though their towns could put municipal ballots in the mail, residents of Pittsford and Brandon had to come in person or request an absentee ballot to vote on school matters.
Collins believes that led to a significant drop in turnout in the school district election.
“It’s been reported to us by voters in those large towns (of Pittsford and Brandon) that they didn’t even realize they hadn’t voted on the school budget, because they voted on what came in the mail,” Collins said.
Last year, town officials recorded roughly 3,000 votes, she said; this year, fewer than 1,000 voted. She believes that contributed to the failure of the budget, which was voted down 522-462.
“The fact that we had such a low, low voter turnout when our two largest towns mailed municipal ballots?” she said. “I think that’s really something that we need to be looking closely at.”
Vermont passed a law with much self-indulgent back-patting that allowed local governments to run vote-by-mail fraud if they so desired. But as noted above, not everyone knows if they voted for something for which they didn’t vote.
Did you follow that? “…they didn’t even realize they hadn’t voted on the school budget, because they voted on what came in the mail,..”
This tells me that they didn’t read the ballot questions on which they voted, but how do you not know if you voted to spend 22.7 million dollars for school funding unless you are not looking at what’s on the ballot in front of you?
The solution to this, if you ask the experts, is not voting by mail or voting in person but voting itself. Like all things primarily obsessed over in public by the Left, the true definition of voting rights is to end voting. Voter suppression is not the problem. It is the goal.
Everything the Dems do distances voters (or taxpayers) from control over how the funds are spent. The less we are allowed to know, the less influence we have, the better. And that’s because while we are smart enough to earn the money, we are too stupid to know how to spend it (on their priorities without their intervention).
I feel certain this 22.7 million dollar school budget is at least 12.7 million, too much, though I may be underestimating the waste, fraud, and abuse doing business as teaching children.
Notice I didn’t say public education. They are not the same thing.
When you educate children you teach them math, science, history, and language skills. If the school is excellent, they will teach critical thinking and debate. Public schools are sieves that launder your money into the hands of Democrat activists through teachers and staff employed by the public, whose job is to prepare future Democrat voters for a life in which, if all goes well, their vote won’t matter.
