ELECTION INSANITY

One of my favorite Einstein quotes is “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. So what does this say about the way we, as members of the Sault Tribe, vote for our representatives?

Many of us have attended the elections over the years and watched the shenanigans take place. There was the appearance of cardboard boxes of ballots that seemed to fall from the sky and contained votes for those that we just can’t seem to get rid of. Witnesses verified that there were no postmarks on the envelopes so where did they come from? How about the presence and obvious concealment of the ‘orange backpack and the huge white bag that got away’ that involved several members of the election committee who violated election committee rules?

Some members have complained that they received their ballot for a different unit than the one they were registered in. Sounds like a little Gerry-mandering going on by manipulating the votes and dividing districts in order to achieve a goal of eliminating voters who may vote against the ‘chosen one’ and placing positive votes where needed.

How about all the confusion over those bad addresses? You live in the same place that you have for years, have received all other mail from the tribe, your address is verified as correct at the health center but yet, the election committee can’t seem to get your ballot to you. Some receive the ballot to vote in the primary and some receive the ballot to vote in the general election but not everyone receives both. If you call after waiting a reasonable length of time, you are told you must not have updated your address but you tell them you have lived at the same address since the tribe was formed and have had no trouble getting the campaign fliers. Since the addresses that are provided to candidates for campaigning purposes are supplied by the election committee, how can an address be good one minute and bad the next? The only answer at that point is that it must have gotten lost in the mail which is really too bad because there is no action that can be taken and you have lost your right to vote.

But yet, we are only a year away from doing it again, in the same way we have always done it. There were more than 3000 names listed (including mine) on that bad address list that was published in the Sault Tribe unnewspaper. I didn’t bother updating mine because what’s the point? But with that being said, there is an amazing number of bad addresses which amounts to approximately 10% of the entire Sault tribe membership. How many of those members aren’t of voting age? I think ½ would be a reasonable guess which means that almost 20% of the Sault Tribe voters have “bad addresses”.

Who is kidding whom here? I may not be Einstein but I’m no fool.