The 11th-grade students in Marc Miloser’s fifth-hour government class at Belleville High School were very interested in what Van Buren Township Clerk Leon Wright had to say last Thursday – especially when he got to the part where they could earn 6 hours of community service credit hours as a volunteer and then $140 for paid service after that.
Clerk Wright invited them to apply to be Student Election Inspectors, a program he is starting this year that not only gets him help for the upcoming elections, but encourages students to become voters when they get to be 18.
Wright gave the same presentation in three other government classes last week and he said a couple of students came to the township hall for applications after his first presentation.
Miloser told the students to listen to Wright because he is the government they’ve been studying about.
Wright said he was elected by the people in 2008 and his most important duty as clerk is to administer elections.
Wright said 17% of the 21,458 registered voters in VBT turned out to vote in the 2010 election and, “Seventeen percent is ridiculous!”
He said just 4% of the 18 year olds voted and he wanted the class’ help to increase that number. He said there are absentee ballots that can be used if you can’t be there for the regular election.
“We’re not going to send the election police out after you,” Wright said.
He said the Student Election Inspectors will help set up the polling location, perform tasks to establish a voter’s right to vote, and assist any individual who may have difficulty with voting.
Student Election Inspectors will be used in a few other area municipalities, but Wright said it takes extra effort for the clerks and some aren’t able to take part in the program.
He foresees the students going down the line of people waiting to vote in this November’s Presidential Election to make sure they are in the right precinct. Voters who find out they are at the wrong precinct after waiting in line to vote, sometimes just give up on the idea of voting and go home, Wright said.
He said VBT will be using an electronic pollbook starting in August which will be on laptops instead of paper books and will allow the skipping of three phases of the check-in process at the polls and enhance checking of signatures of voters.
He said since Haggerty Elementary School is closing, the Haggerty voting precinct is expected to be at Savage Elementary, where there will be two precincts.
The students asked Wright how he happened to become clerk and he told the story of how he had run for school board and lost and was going to run again in 2008, but was encouraged by the late School Supt. Pete Lazaroff to run for clerk instead, since the VBT clerk was running unopposed.
Supt. Lazaroff had planned to go door to door with Wright to campaign, but Lazaroff became ill and couldn’t. Wright said he went on to run an extensive campaign and won the election by 84 votes.
Before becoming full-time clerk, he ran a sporting goods business on Main Street in downtown Belleville and then closed the storefront and continued the business out of his home using a website.
Wright said the first step to being a good citizen is getting an education. Then, a young person has to get registered to vote and become informed before voting.
Students lined up to get applications from Wright after class ended. Applications for Student Election Inspectors are available from the BHS government teachers and from the VBT clerk’s office, 699-8910.
Students will volunteer service at the first election and then are eligible to get paid $15 for a training session and $125 for the next election.