Original diary entry
From todays edition of the University of Pennsylvania's Daily Pennsylvanian
Letters to the Editor
November 10, 2004
Trouble at a polling place
To the Editor:
Why was the alleged Republican kicker working as an election official?
On Tuesday morning, like many of us, I went to vote. My polling place, the one for ward 27, district 11, was 3609 Chestnut St., a cozy-looking rehabilitation care center next to the Divine Tracy Hotel. When I got to the voter registration desk, I became a witness to a confrontation between an election official and a Democratic poll watcher whose name unfortunately escapes me. The election official was behaving very aggressively, and telling the poll watcher that, among other things, she must not speak to any of the voters, or to him, and if she did, he would call the police. She was visibly upset and a little overwhelmed, but she kept her cool. Though they were peers, she called him "sir" to try to diffuse the tension. (I admire her patience, something I don't have nearly as much of; were I in her place, I would've called him anything but sir.)
I learned soon afterwards that this had not been the worst of it, and that it had been going on all morning. At one point, the election official had verbally intimidated a homeless man, causing him to leave without casting his vote, and had prevented the poll watcher from intervening. When the election official involved me in the confrontation, addressing me and blaming the poll watcher for the delay, I said something brief in her defense. She then asked me if I could give a statement of what I had just witnessed to a couple of lawyers, and I gladly did.
This is when I was shocked to learn the identity of the election official: Wharton junior Scott Robinson, better known as the alleged convention kicker.
I find it absolutely despicable that someone alleged to have acted in such a wantonly irresponsible and gratuitously violent manner, someone who makes a sick, cruel joke of the United States of America, should be entrusted with a position of such responsibility in overseeing a process that is vital to our democracy and central to our identity as a nation. Why did this happen? Furthermore, I am inclined to ask, when it is people like Robinson who are able to play a part in our political process, without someone, somewhere, objecting to the absurdity of it, what does that say about what this political process has become?
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Dr. Amy Gutmann, President
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