Does your MEA vote count?

How would you like to be told to vote, but that your vote may or may not count and you don’t get to ever know. Well, that’s the way MEA handles its board elections. When you send your ballot into MEA you won’t be informed if your vote is counted. If you forgot to sign the outside envelope or if the Election Committee did not think your signature matched the signature card MEA had on file for you, your vote will be discarded.

Don’t think it’s a big deal? Well, MEA management says that they throw out at least 4 percent of ballots each election. Many times, that’s more than the margin of victory in an election.

Recently a man, who wanted to run for a board position, was almost kept off the ballot because someone signed his petition differently than she did her membership card. Since the same process for verifying petition signatures is used to verify ballot signatures, that woman probably would not have had her vote counted either, and would never have been told about it. She and a lot of other people would just go merrily along, voting faithfully and thinking they are taking part in the democratic process, and all the while their votes are just going in the trash when a phone call could fix the problem.

A motion was made at the last board meeting by Peter Burchell to inform members if their ballot gets rejected. The motion failed four to three. Lee Jordan, Larry DeVilbiss, David Dahms and David Glines voted against letting you know if your vote won’t be counted because, as management said, they’d have to contact too many people.

When I, in good faith, send in my ballot, I would like to know if my vote gets counted. Wouldn’t you?

Michelle Schuman

and Mark Clark,

Sutton