Those Who Serve Aren’t Always In Uniform

Submitted by Kenneth Peterson, MAJ USA (Ret.), Buchanan MI

Editor, 

Those who serve aren’t always in uniform. 

The Buchanan City Clerk and Buchanan Township Clerk offices did an excellent job during our recent midterm election. I along with several other poll watchers were privileged to observe processes firsthand at the 3-polling places in the Buchanan Area.

Buchanan Clerks spent many nights and weekends ahead of the election working to ensure we all had safe and well-functioning voting processes and accurate tabulation of our votes. They provided leadership to the polling teams for long hours on election day and they ran into a few curveballs along the way

In an incident on election day, a software problem prevented Buchanan Township poll watchers from using computers for automated assistance. The Clerk, her staff, and the poll workers shifted to a slower manual process to allow people to vote. The line initially backed up, but the poll workers were able to keep things moving. The Clerk got quick assistance from Berrien County to repair the software issue. There was, however, one effort to create problems by attempting to focus the local TV news on this computer issue. By the time the TV news personnel arrived, the problem had been solved and the voter lines were back to reasonable wait times. 

Staff and poll workers worked all day and into the evening on election day without much of a break because they truly cared about helping all of us have a quality, non-partisan election process. 

If you get the chance, you might want to pass on a “Thank You for your Service” to our town Clerks and their staff: (Wendy Heyliger, at Buchanan Township and Kalla Langston, at Buchanan City).

~ Ken Peterson, MAJ USA (Ret.), Buchanan

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