Letter from the Mid Hudson Times, Wednesday, June 3, 2009, page 9.
Letters: Polling Survey
On School Board election day, my son Ian and I briefly interviewed 102 voters as they exited four polling places located in the towns of Newburgh and New Windsor and the City of Newburgh. Although it would be ludicrous to claim scientific accuracy, I do believe the results of our polling are meaningful. There was a surprisingly high level of participation in the survey with only 15 voters declining to answer our questions. The vast majority seemed genuinely grateful for the opportunity to share their thoughts, many offering opinions and providing details about their voting experience that extended far beyond the narrow scope of the survey.
The survey consisted of six questions:
How many school board candidates did you vote for?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your knowledge of the candidates? one meaning that you know nothing relevant about any of them and five meaning that you are well informed about each of them.
Do you or any member of your immediate family work for the district?
Did you vote on the budget?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how knowledgeable are you about the budget?
Upon what source did you rely for most of the information upon which you based your votes?
Space limitation permits only a brief summary of the data.
Fifty-two, or slightly more than half the respondents, said that they or members of their immediate family are employed by the district. Even if all 2,100 of the districts employees lived and voted in the district, they and their immediate family would comprise at most 5 percent of the total district population. Allowing for even large margins of error; the poll clearly shows that district employees exercise clout at the polls grossly out of proportion to their numbers.
The average self assessment of knowledge about the candidates was 2.42 on the one to five scale described above. When evaluating this number; one must factor in the natural tendency to inflate one's own image. In conversations initiated by several respondents after being polled, I discovered that many who rated themselves highly actually new little or nothing about some of the candidates, in many cases unable to to list even the four names they just read on the ballot.
Four out of five voted for three candidates. Many were surprised that they were asked how many candidates they voted for. They misunderstood the voting instructions as a requiring them to vote for three candidates rather than to vote for a maximum of three candidates. It was evident that many were making blind guesses to meet this misperceived "requirement."
Elections, if they are to be accurate assessments of the will of the people, must have the participation of informed voters whose numbers proportionately reflect the general interest groups of the population. Ideally the number of voters should be large enough to minimize the statistical quirks of an undersized sampling. To put it in plainer language, a lot of people from all walks of life have to drag their butts to the polls. Nothing of the sort happened in Newburgh last Tuesday.
A paltry 2,200 voters bothered to cast ballots in a district of approximately 32,000 registered voters. The "winners" each received about 1,300 votes, roughly 3 percent of the total available. These anemic numbers alone would suggest that only in the most legalistic sense can the winners call themselves elected "representatives." As bleak as things look from this fact alone, deeper analysis reveals an even more disheartening picture.
Newburgh School Board elections are essentially an "in-house" exercise. District employees and their immediate families vote in numbers far disproportionate to their percentage of the community as a whole. This imbalance is amplified by the fact that district employees are, in most elections, guided by the endorsements of their unions, whereas a woefully under-informed public is often guessing at their school board choices. The random votes of the public tend to cancel each other out, making that much stronger the focused votes of the organized employees.
I believe that the appalling level of voter apathy in Newburgh is no accident; that district officials purposely discourage voter turnout and impede the flow of information that would make for a better informed and more engaged citizenry. I also believe that while there is no single solution or easy fix to these problems, there are many incremental improvements that cumulatively can make a big difference. I will save that discussion for future writing. But I hope that I have at least presented you with reasons to be seriously concerned, perhaps even alarmed about how Newburgh elects its education leaders.
To the extent that a democratic institution is only as valid as the electoral process that undergrids it, Newburgh schools are govenered without a trace of legitimacy.
Bennet Weiss
Newburgh