To a city and region as devoted to being as countercultural and anti-establishment as are San Francisco and the Bay Area, I have a disturbing statement to make: I’m pro-establishment. On your list of people likely to quote Karl Marx, you can put me very far toward the bottom. But even I will admit that he did write the great line, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
As San Francisco voters present their verdict on the mayoral candidates this week, it’s worth noticing the clown show that is unfolding in New York City, where incumbent Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and illegally soliciting foreign campaign money. Who does he think he is — the mayor of Oakland?
And if Adams’s indictment achievement isn’t enough shame for our Big Apple friends to bear, word comes that former mayor Rudy Giuliani is possibly considering a comeback as a candidate for mayor there. Now, the source is the New York Post, so it’s fully possible that he’s not considering a comeback, that if he did it wouldn’t be for New York mayor, and that there is no such person as Rudy Giuliani. But he might need the job, the way his legal troubles have been unfolding.
Most recently, Giuliani has had to deal with U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman ordering him to turn over assets — including 26 luxury watches, a 1980 Mercedes once owned by Lauren Bacall (how is this guy not gay?), a $5 million Manhattan condo, and more — to start satisfying an eye-watering $148 million defamation judgment won against him by two former Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.
As PBS reports, “Pushing Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Giuliani falsely accused Freeman and Moss of ballot fraud, saying they snuck in ballots in suitcases, counted ballots multiple times and tampered with voting machines. Freeman and Moss sued for defamation and said the false allegations led to death threats that made them fear for their lives. A jury in Washington awarded them $148 million last year.”
To which all of us who have friends and family who have been election workers can only say, “Good.”
Before my mother passed away last year, she had served as an election worker for many years in her hometown of Green Bay, Wis. She was one of the people who welcomed voters and gave them their ballots, made sure protocols were adhered to during the day, collected all of the ballots at the end of the voting day, and frequently (especially after she became the chief of that voting station) physically drove the ballots downtown to deliver them to the central election offices.
Adams has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign money. Who does he think he is — the mayor of Oakland?
Before her passing, she had been in a seniors’ apartment complex for several years and hadn’t been able to work her polling station. I’m kind of glad, because as activists on the far right have ginned up their campaigns to intimidate anyone who might stand in their way of gaslighting America into thinking the election system is a corrupt system run by illegal aliens from Venezuela in cahoots with Iranian mullahs, there has been a substantial increase in threats and intimidation of election workers.
In May, Politico reported that “more than a third of surveyed local election officials have experienced threats, harassment, or abuse due to their jobs,” according to a poll from the Brennan Center for Justice. As a result, election officials are leaving in droves. The good news is that, as Brennan Center reports, most local election offices have done things to increase election security since the wild 2020 election. Fifty-six percent have implemented or improved protections for election technology; other changes have included the sharing of information with law enforcement, training, upgraded voting machine infrastructure, and other things.
In Georgia, where Giuliani’s victims worked, the director of elections in Cobb County has been dealing with how to prepare for everything from threatening letters to active shooters: “At the end of every work day, [she] checks her car’s rearview mirror to make sure she’s not being followed home. When she goes to the supermarket, she finds herself checking for exits.”
People often mistakenly think the “establishment” is powerful people who ensure a conservative system keeps out any outsiders. But on the top levels, the establishment is just whoever is in power. Sometimes that’s the Clintons, sometimes that’s Reaganites, sometimes that’s Donald Trump, and sometimes, like in San Francisco, it’s the progressive left, which denounces the establishment even as it is it. But on the real level that matters, the most numerous level, the level that keeps your Social Security checks coming and your streets cleaned and your ballots counted, it is nameless people who do their work not out of a desire for fame or fortune, but because they know streets need to be cleaned, votes counted, checks mailed, and the system upheld for one and for all.
Someday, over a glass of good wine or beer, I’ll tell you my favorite election worker story (it involves a distinctly Chicago form of posthumous voting). But for now, let’s just lift a glass in honor of the dedicated people who make our political system work for everyone. You might not even notice them, you don’t know their political leanings, and you don’t even know their names.
Unless they sue Rudy Giuliani.
