Some last-minute thoughts were written before Tuesday’s election, along with a reminder that an election is a starting point for governing, not an end in itself.
First, consider harvests – or more specifically, vote harvesting with its long history, in both the near and distant past. Basically, it amounts to a campaign operative, paid or unpaid, getting a larger group together to cast ballots for the operative’s candidate or slate of candidates.
Vote harvesting does not enjoy a rosy reputation, although the practice in some cases is understandable. In an atmosphere of intimidation and sometimes violence during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, newly minted black voters banded together to go to the polls as a group. (In Putnam County, the August 1870 election ended in organized gunfire, with one black man killed and four others sent to the state penitentiary.)
Sometimes party affiliation matters little. Just two years ago, a North Carolina Republican congressman eventually lost his job after an operative working for him paid small sums to people to apply for absentee ballots, followed up by his “help” in filling out their choices.
The practice also can have a silly side. There are tales of eager-beaver campaign managers sending out a volunteer to a nearby nursing home with the encouraging line, “I bet you can pick up a hundred votes out there in an afternoon.”
The volunteer staggers back later with the report: “I only got three.”
Turns out Granny, who hadn’t had a visitor in two weeks, was no fool. “Come sit over here and let’s talk a spell,” one granny after another would say.
Regardless, the more immediate point here lies in an unnoticed provision in Georgia’s new Republican-led election law. Senate Bill 202, as it is called, provides a $100,000 penalty, on each charge of vote harvesting.
So much for the “Souls to the Polls” technique used somewhat successfully by Democrats Stacey Abrams in 2018 and Raphael Warnock in 2020. It had organized black church members to go vote after church services, either at polling sites open on Sundays or in church assembly halls.
In the June primaries two years ago during the first Covid scare, Putnam’s large, and heavily Republican, Lake Oconee voting precinct cast the county’s largest percentage of absentee ballots, 46 percent. In this year’s election cycle, however, absentee ballots in the Nov. 8 general election accounted for only 7 percent of the 10,000-plus votes cast county-wide.
Second, consider signs. The thoughts start with last Friday’s decision by the Putnam Board of Commissioners to allow up to three “displays” of goods and services offered by a business in the county’s major zoning category, C-1.
I openly admit I could be wrong here, or at least open to accusations of overly active imagination, but parts of the decision were unclear to me, and I was unsuccessful Monday in getting any clarifications.
Where did this issue come from, and, indeed, what was the issue? Although entirely possible, I cannot see a convenience store having an outside display of the chewing gum it sells inside.
My guess, and it is only a guess, is the commissioners’ attention was focused on boats and only boats. Boats are big. They are tangible objects, often visibly and wow-factor splashy. In recent months several new boat storage or boat sales businesses have made zoning-related requests. Outdoor displays of boats have been part of the discussion.
Two questions: one, are established businesses grandfathered into original zoning rules? I think of Crowe’s Marine, which has operated here for decades with quite a few boats displayed both outsides and in front of the showroom.
Two, does the zoning ordinance define “display”? Can our convenience store have three 10-foot tall, inflatable, red rubber Coke cans? Can a dentist's office have a 10’x10’ plaster-of-Paris molar with prominent cavities, maybe even on a 40-foot pole?
Can a “display” include a picture? Words? In short, can it be a sign? The point here is that maybe, just maybe, both the city and the county should be taking a serious look at their sign ordinances. Yes, it would be difficult. It would be contentious, with a lot of stakeholders. It would be a thankless task.
We are a creative people. If a loophole is there, somebody will find it. Old School response: an ounce of prevention tops a pound of cure.