Voting by Mail Is for Dinosaurs

UFT Unity adores it, but it's time for a change.

Please sign this petition. It asks that we use electronic voting, and/ or in-school voting (I very much prefer the former) for the next UFT election, so as to maximize participation. After you sign, please share it with friends, and post it to whatever social media you favor.

Why?

Mailboxes are all but obsolete. Yet UFT bosses insist on using them for elections. For at least as far back as I can recall, this has not worked well. A small minority has regularly chosen UFT leadership. If democracy is our goal, that’s less than ideal.

For years, voting participation in the UFT has been abysmal. In the last election, 75% of us could not be bothered to vote. Voting is too cumbersome or inconvenient for the overwhelming majority of our membership. That’s unacceptable.

UFT Unity resists efforts to improve this. In 2021, a proposal to use electronic voting was rejected by every Unity member of the Executive Board. Unity members vote in a bloc, as instructed. They sign an oath to do so. Oath or no oath, it’s absurd to point to mail-in voting as successful for our union.

On the other hand, it’s been successful for the Unity Caucus, which has had total control of our union for over 60 years. This iron-clad total control clearly made Unity believe they could dump retirees from the health care they’ve been promised all their careers without consequence. It made them confident they could strip voting from us at Retired Teacher Chapter meetings, which they happily did for several years.

This year, even with mail-in voting, they failed. Could they fail again? Could they stage a great comeback? Given the election is winner-take-all, there’s not much middle ground. Regardless, just like in a classroom, it’s vital to encourage and elicit participation. When we fail in classrooms, we try new things. Why can’t we extrapolate that practice to unionism?

I was a chapter leader of a large school for 12 years, and I represented many members. Sometimes, if you’re caught on YouTube mushing a Whopper with heavy, heavy mayo into the assistant principal’s face, the best thing you can say might be, “I’m sorry. That will never happen again.” Unity’s response to us may as well be, “Screw you, we’re doing it again tomorrow.”

Rampant member apathy has empowered Unity to do nothing to improve, let alone repair the pattern bargaining that leaves city workers effectively earning less year after year. And hey, when they claim there’s nothing they can do about it, I believe them. Let’s vote on it.

I ask teachers how they are as I see them in the morning. Some sarcastically respond, in one of the best schools in the city, “Livin’ the dream!” Teachers forty years younger than I am tell me how lucky I am to be retired. I’d bet you dimes to dollars these teachers have never voted in a UFT election. Maybe if we encouraged or promoted activism, starting with making it easier for them to vote, we could work to remedy that.

I’m old enough to remember when snail mail was the only way to communicate over long distances. My wife is from Colombia, and I remember paying two dollars a minute for phone calls there. But those days are long gone. Email is immediate, and can go anywhere. Texting is the same, and if your phone carrier won’t cooperate, you can use WhatsApp and avoid those nasty data or roaming charges.

I used to sit with a checkbook and pay all my bills. I’d seal the checks, write a return address, and stamp the envelopes. Then I’d dump all the envelopes in the mailbox. Once, in November, I got a call from the Post Office. Someone, to celebrate Halloween, had thrown eggs into the interior of the box, and my bills, including a last-minute auto insurance payment, were undeliverable.

Mailboxes are safer now, as you slide envelopes through a small slot. Still, I rarely use them. I go online, and my bank delivers the checks. That way, if someone has an issue, they can talk to Chase about it instead of me. Chase tells me to pay tax bills via mail, so I visit the old mailbox just a few times a year.

The overwhelming majority of teachers are younger than I am. They’re likely to use mailboxes even less than I do. Yesterday I asked a student how often she used a mailbox, and she instantly replied, “Never.”

In 2024, it’s ridiculous for us to vote via mail. We certainly get far more participation when we vote in school. And yet, even there, chapter leaders are required to lug a bag of ballots to the post office, as some bicker that the CL cheated for one side or another. That’s one reason I prefer the electronic option.

As the petition states:

We already vote for our contracts in our chapters. We vote electronically for school based options. We’ve allowed for electronic voting at our delegate assemblies, also. Many other unions have moved to digital ballots.

Why must we be mired in a process that, by any reasonable standard, does not work? I’ve been to a few chapter leader trainings, and I distinctly recall being lectured about how, in order to support union-endorsed candidates, we needed to raise the voting percentages in general elections. Ironically, none of those cited elections, as much as the rep complained , rivaled the lack of participation we have in our own union voting.

As chapter leader, teachers would approach me with complaints about almost everything. I recall an older teacher complaining about the union leadership.

“Did you vote?” I asked him.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “But I’ve got the ballot on my refrigerator, and I’m gonna do it soon.”

As you can imagine, the guy never voted. How many members does that guy represent? With 25% participation, it may well be a majority. Or perhaps the majority tosses the ballots out unopened. Your guess is as good as mine.

As teachers, it’s our job to promote participation, curiosity and learning, not apathy. In fact, as role models, we ought not to practice it either. While it’s nice that LeRoy Barr, or someone, sends an email reminding us to vote, it’s clearly not having the effect it ought to.

Why can’t I vote on my beloved little MacBook Air? Why can’t members vote on their ubiquitous cell phones? If other unions can use readily available 21st-century technology to vote, why can’t we? Daniel Alicea wrote:

The transition to an electronic voting option would be seamless with the American Arbitration Association, the company our union has used for years to conduct fair and secure elections. They offer an electronic voting option and use many of the reasons we delineate why this is an optimal and preferred option.

So why can’t we do that?

The only reason that pops into my mind is this—the Unity Caucus is fraidy-scared of member voice, even more so than usual (now that they lost two concurrent elections in landslides). But hey, I could be wrong.

Prove me wrong, Mulgrew. Sign the petition yourself.