Being from Illinois, I ‘d watched for decades as our government officials engaged in more and
more organized criminal behavior, with less and less Federal law enforcement action taken
against it. Sure, the occasional Chicago Alderman would get busted for taking a bribe here and
there, but these prosecutions were window-dressing, not addressing the real criminality
behind Machine politics. Worse, it seemed that Chicago Machine politics had been franchised all over the country.
Then 2020 happened. The events of that year started to look an awful lot like the Color Revolution of 2014 Ukraine -- and the same American political figures involved in Ukraine were leading the charge against Donald Trump. There was no question what was afoot. I needed to do something. I needed to be useful to stop this takeover of our country.
True the Vote has seen all of this coming ten years before, now they were urging everyone to get involved in their local elections, so I did. I had to. What was happening in our schools was reason enough to jump in.
As in other communities, the communist infiltration of our schools had begun a while back, but it was not until 2020 that people started comparing notes- it was bad and getting worse, fast. We knew we had to organize and develop a strategy.
In August 2020, the principal at one of the high schools unilaterally declared in a letter to the
all the parents, faculty, and staff, that the entire district supported the Black Lives Matter movement - the same movement that was setting our neighborhoods on fire. Our parents’ group grew quickly.
In Fall 2020, our group lead the charge in getting the schools reopened, overriding the
school board’s plan to focus on making remote learning “exciting.” We sent a few district wide emails (yes, we typed each email address in manually) reminding teachers that their political views were to remain private and that they could withdraw from the teachers’ union per the SCOTUS decision in AFSCME v Janus. And we got the principal fired.
We assembled an extremely impressive slate of candidates for the April 2021 elections and
campaigned hard. Alas, this is Illinois, and we inevitably ran up against the powerful
infrastructure of the Teachers’ Union. Our slate lost badly. And I saw our broken election process up close.
Desperate to be useful in the election integrity movement, I attended a workshop in my
area where I learned election basics and more importantly, common election fraud schemes. While organizing people is not my strength, I decided to become an Election Judge Coordinator and Poll Watcher. I read the manual, worked with new friends to share ideas, and recruited on social media. I managed to get six people through the process and into Election Judge seats.
On Primary Day, I went to a work in a polling place in a nearby town. The Polling Place was immaculately run, everything by the book. As I was learning about the process from the the Election Judges in between voters, I got a text from a neighbor. All hell had broken loose at my own polling place. I tore out of there and headed straight into disaster.
Pretty much everything had gone wrong. The Election Judges were not able to access the polling place the night before to set up, so it opened 2.5 hours late. One Election Judge called in sick. The other two were first-timers, and one of them was 16 years old. The touchscreens didn’t work. The Sharpies were bleeding through. Two precincts were sharing equipment and judges, resulting in voters getting the wrong ballots. The scanner was broken, and they couldn’t locate the lockbox backup, so ballots were strewn in a pile on the floor. The Judges were forgetting to initial the ballots and they had had time to set up only two election booths, so voters were getting heated. It was a mess, but it would have been worse had we not been there to help. And next time, we’ll be prepared.
I’m proud and humbled to join the ranks of all the patriots who are stepping up in ways big
and small to serve in our elections. I hope my story will inspire you to serve in 2024 - it’s truly been one of the greatest experiences, and honors, of my lifetime.
