Many thanks to Tom Ayau for coming out and filming last month’s ACLU dinner.

Also, many thanks to the hardy folks from the Tea Party who braved the freezing rain and snow while protesting outside the event! (Aren’t civil liberties awesome?!)

There’s a gentleman here in Southbridge who is fond of saying “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” This post is dedicated to him.

After the ACLU event last month, folks seemed taken aback by the demographic numbers I used in my remarks describing the ethnic makeup of the people of Southbridge versus the 6th Worcester legislative district as a whole, and more than one person asked me if I misspoke.
(I didn’t!)

The numbers I got were from the 2010 United States Census. Here’s the data:

Total Population of Southbridge: 16,719.
Of this group, 4,452, or 26.6%, are listed as Hispanic or Latino.

Total Population of the 6th Worcester District: 41,225.
Of this group, 5,104, or  12.38%, are listed at Hispanic or Latino.

Which of course means a whopping 652,  or 1.58% of folks listed as Hispanic or Latino within the 6th Worcester District, live somewhere other than Southbridge.

So yes, I stand by my previous assertions that the misleading advertisement on Hook Street this past spring was specifically targeted to Hispanic voters.

You can double check these numbers yourself with very neat tool on the Census.gov site, called American Fact Finder.

On a more humorous note, I couldn’t help but laugh this week when I saw the ad currently posted on the billboard down on Hook Street:

Apparently the all-knowing Free Market, in its infinite wisdom, agrees that the Hook Street location is a fantastic place to target advertisements to folks of a certain demographic.  Or maybe not?  I’m sure Bustelo Coffee is just as delicious no matter what language you speak while drinking it.

Check it out! My photo of Everyone’s Favorite Billboard was on television a couple weeks ago:

MSNBC won’t let me embed the video in any sort of legal fashion, so click here to get to the page where you can watch it.

According to South Coast Today, state Elections Commission Chairman Maria Tomasia will go back to requiring a letter from the Secretary of State for all election observers.

As I mentioned recently on The Greater Southbridge Project, the work we did this past spring is being recognized by the Worcester County Chapter of the ACLU at their annual dinner tomorrow.

So Awesome!  Thanks, Civil Libertarians!

Late Monday night, I received word of yet another honor:  The Worcester Tea Party folks are planning to take time our of their busy lives to come out on Thursday night to protest this award!

Is it bad that I feel even more honored that the Worcester Tea Party folks think I’m so attention-worthy?  I’m blushing, you guys!    Thanks so much!   See you Thursday!  

I’ve been meaning to wrap up this long crazy story for weeks now, but it seems my poor battered community cannot catch a break long enough for me to get back to blogging. Add my busy young family into the mix, and well, all I can say is that we’re lucky we’ve all got clean pants, let alone things like streetlights and a functional municipal government. (Tea Party Editor’s note: Your Trusty Blogger’s pants status is currently OFF, there are no streetlights down on Brookside Road and Charlton Street, and as always, Southbridge is still bringing the FUN to Dysfunctional Failed Democracy. Oh, snap!)

Oh, I’m sorry, did someone say Tea?  Clearly we have a lot to catch up on.

Anyhow, yes.  On May 24th, something crazy happened.  One of my fellow Team Integrity miscreants and I headed over to the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office for the public hearing on the revisions to 950 CMR 52.0 and 54.00. (These were the “emergency clarifications” these folks issued in response to Southbridge poll observers & challenges.)

Curiously enough, almost nobody actually made it to this public hearing, which is weird when you stop and consider the view from Bill Galvin’s conference room:

Even Curiouser, the one other person who did show up was the lady herself, Christen Varley.  But that wasn’t the crazy part.  The thing that was Utterly Totally Bananas was the fact that EVERYONE IN THE ROOM AGREED that the new regulations were a good idea, and should be adopted as-is.

I am still pretty utterly shocked about all of this, and my mind has been reeling ever since.  I never would have ever imagined Christen Varley and I would ever have managed to come to a consensus on Anything Ever, let alone the importance of giving voters a fair shake.

And now for something Entirely Different: did you know there’s another local blogger out there writing about Voter Fraud?   I sure didn’t!   I asked him if he’d be interested in contributing a guest post, but in his email reply back to me he called me both an airhead AND a moron.  I felt strangely proud, although I know I won’t have truly made it onto the local political scene until I start getting creepy anonymous letters in the mail from folks who are old enough to be my parents.  That will be a very weird day, I’m sure, and I can see it coming down the pike.

There’s so much interesting media coverage of what went down in Southbridge. This article by Tom Driscoll was especially thought-provoking:

When is a housewife “just” a housewife, and when is she something else entirely? Are housewives politically active by nature, or are politically active housewives total and utter freaks of nature? Where does that crazy lady from Target fall on the spectrum? The mind boggles.

I don’t pretend to have answers to any of the questions I’m asking here. My own experiences over the past two months have led me to find more questions than I’ll ever be able to find answers for. Over the course of my participation in the Voters 4 Integrity activism project, I got a lot of “Who does she think she is?” style pushback from all the Mommy-type folks a generation up the family tree from me. My mom literally thinking I was having paranoid delusions when I called her crying because the nice lady investigators at the Justice Department & Attorney General’s Office kept calling/emailing me was pretty awkward. I’m just glad I was able to show her the emails so she didn’t drag me off to the psych ward. Apparently smart women who care about things are inherently batshit crazy and I just haven’t gotten the memo.

I will say that the idea of anyone being “just” a housewife is extremely frustrating to me. My husband and I decided to marry because we wanted to start a family, but I left full-time work about a year in advance of conceiving our first child. The implication that I spent that year doing any less work than I did when I was employed full-time is incredibly insulting. I planned a giant family wedding, renovated part of our apartment building, cleared out a bunch of our land, and transitioned to freelance work, all while popping prenatal vitamins and researching pregnancy. I may not have been collecting a paycheck, but it sure felt like I was earning one!

Motherhood, of course, is a different can of worms entirely. Pro-tip: don’t even go there if you want to keep your scalp.

I’m not entirely caught up on work, sleep, or family, but I wanted to try and get some of the press reaction to our Election Day Stand Out into the blog sooner rather than later. I was quoted in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on Wednesday, May 11:

The crux of the article is that thanks to the emergency regulations courtesy of our good friends at the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office, which clearly defined what vote challengers can and cannot do, yesterday’s special election was a lot different from the Primary on April 12. Everybody across the board classed up & we managed to have a civil, mostly-polite, and functional Election Day.

You can read the full text of Clive McFarlane’s article on the T&G site. My favorite part is right at the end:

“Who would have thought Southbridge would become an example for the rest of the state,” Ms. Varley asked.

Only Southbridge residents, perhaps.

I’ve never met Christen Varley, but she seems like a really interesting lady, full of deep, perplexing contradictions. She responded to Mr. McFarlane’s article in the comments section of the T&G website, which I will address below:

Despite all the unreasonable tactics & strategies in terms of achieving her objectives, this lady is not inherently unreasonable. In her own words, this is what she’s trying to accomplish:

“…taking the grey area, the judgement call, out of the hands of the Poll Worker and putting the responsibility of voter eligibility back into the hands of the voter will only make us all appreciate the privilege of voting more.

I can totally understand and appreciate this sentiment, although I admit I will always chafe at the idea of voting being a “Privilege” as opposed to a “Right,” or as I prefer to think, a “Responsibility.” And although I am admittedly undecided on the whole Show ID To Vote question, the fact that it’s so weirdly championed by such a strange person makes me pretty skeptical about the intentions behind it. State-issued Government ID seems like such a big-brother, big-government thing in general, and as a privacy nut I really hate showing my ID any more than I am absolutely, legally required to do so.

What I don’t understand and will never appreciate is why she felt the need to try and achieve her objectives with a single slimy billboard in a “bad” brown neighborhood, which was packed with so much nuance & ambiguity it takes doctoral-levels of information literacy & cultural fluency to unpack all the meaning, implications and intent behind it.

As for the controversy surrounding her group’s actions in Southbridge at the April 12th Primary, well. I was in and out right when the polls opened because I had a full day planned with my children, so I wasn’t there personally. I only know what I read in the paper and what I heard from people I know in town. I will say, however, that I grew up in a community full of Spanish-speaking native-born American citizens, and the implication that some Americans are more American than Other Americans really rubs me the wrong way. I also have an adoptive brother with cognitive disabilities who is actively involved as a Democrat locally in the Town of Southbridge, and he had nothing positive to tell me about April 12 either.

The personal is political, the political is personal, all politics is local, and everything is always more complicated than you think it is. If you made it this far down to the end of the post, I thank you for your time reading through all this. I hope you have a nice weekend.

We’re having lots of fun at our Stand Out. This blog probably won’t be updated again today, but in the meantime, check out what’s going on over at Flickr.com:

Happy Election Day, everyone!

We’ll meet you in the streets:

Happy Election Day, 6th Worcester! Let’s do this!

In the time between my writing the April 15 Letter to the Editor and its eventual publication, things just kept getting weirder for me. I had complained on the Internet so effectively that over 2,000 people viewed my photo of the billboard on Flickr. I was on the phone at all hours with journalists from national news media outlets, state and federal agencies, and the very lovely and nice people at ACLU Massachusetts. (For reals, I am baking those ACLU people some cookies when this is all over.)

As this was all going on, I noticed a growing amount of scrutiny in terms of my own Internet presence. People were Googling me more. I started getting all sorts of creepy right-wing harassment on Twitter. Weirdos on the Internet started following my sister on Twitter as well, and an especially classy group of people made a special account on Twitter specifically for the purpose of intimidating me. I was not impressed. Between the weird stuff on the Internet and the phone calls from the Department of Justice, I was starting to freak out a little.

Then, I was harassed in person, at Target of all places, for talking about the billboard in public. Once that happened, I stopped freaking out.  I realized the utter absurdity of the situation, and then I was Just Plain Mad.  I went home and wrote an open letter to everyone involved on every side of the campaign and sent it out to everyone in my address book. It’s viewable publicly on Facebook, but it’s pasted here below as well:

Hey, folks.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/19/6496400-voter-intimidation-in-massachusetts

Please forward at will, as far and wide as humanly possible.

In respect and love,
With Liberty and Justice FOR ALL,
Amelia L. Peloquin