Altruistic volunteers spend day at polls

By Audrey Carpenter

In an election seen as critical for Loudouners, volunteers came out in force to stand outside polling precincts today across the County to welcome, thank and encourage people to vote. The 2023 race has legislative and judicial implications, as well as educational impact with all nine school board seats up for vote.

“We had 934 poll workers and 95 high school volunteers,” said Samantha Shepherd, outreach coordinator with the Loudoun County Office of Elections and Voter Registration.

“What motivated me to be an election officer is I am a professor of geopolitics, national security, foreign policy and international relations and a historian. I’ve lived in many parts of the world in countries that are very authoritarian and I’ve realized how important the vote is,” said Paul Coyer, a research professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. and an associate professor at l’Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French Army’s equivalent of West Point. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at Italia-Atlantica, a foreign policy think tank based in Rome, Italy.’

He spent the day at Cool Spring Elementary School in Leesburg standing outside wearing a satchel to receive absentee ballots. He has volunteered in four elections in Loudoun County and is a Leesburg resident.

Paul lived in both Shanghi and Hong Kong, China and it was during that time that he really got a deep understanding of the differences between democracy and communism. His wife is from Venezuela and was raised by Cubans who had had to flee Cuba under Fidel and ended up in Venezuela prior to Hugo Chavez.

“As an immigrant from a socialist country, she is just as vocal as I am about freedom. It’s a pattern across all these totalitarian regimes where they take the rights of the common people away for the economic and political elites and it repeats itself around the world.”

“Americans sometimes take for granted that they live in a democratic country and forget that people died to maintain the privilege to vote and other freedoms,” Coyer said. He has relatives that fought in the Civil War on the Union side, and both of his grandfathers fought in World War II with one fighting against the Nazis and the other as a Marine in the Pacific against the Japanese.

“The character of the American people is changing. We are losing the capacity for self-government. I believe that the culture necessary to support self-government is rapidly being degraded. Unless we work to change our trajectory, we will end up in a very bad place. We won’t realize our freedoms are gone until it’s too late,” Coyer said.

For Amanda Shallant, a Leesburg resident and mother of four children, it was all about education. She volunteered her lunch hour to hand out sample ballots at Harper Park Middle School to come and support candidate Lauren Shernoff for the school board.

“I want all of our kids to be able to put the best foot forward in the education system and for future success. It was really attractive to me to find a candidate for the school board who is not about partisan politics, but just wants excellence in education and wants to support teachers and parents because it’s becoming more and more difficult with the issues that are in classrooms that our teachers have to deal with. I feel like there’s a real disconnect between very highly paid administrators and what our teachers are going through in the classroom,” she said.

Shallant’s children range from 11 years old to four months and she says education and literacy are important in her home. With the wide age range between her children, the quality of education for years to come is a key consideration in the election for her.

Kevin Cox is a 32-year Sterling resident and has steadily volunteered in elections throughout that time. Cox volunteers the entire day because he says because voting is that important to him, and for an off-year election the number of voters he saw coming to the polls in Potomac Falls was steady.

“You’ve got to love election day. That’s what democracy is about. It’s a gift,” he said.

“In today’s environment, I feel like one party is focused on cultural issues that’s important to them and the other party is focused on pragmatic matters that deliver services to the people, and that’s what’s important to me. I don’t like getting mired down in a lot of these cultural issues which are exaggerated beyond that they actually are,” Cox expressed.

“I want to stay focused on the pragmatic issues that help our community, help our economy, help healthcare. I feel strongly that the Democratic party is trying to achieve that. I think the Republican party is going in a different direction by stoking fear and I don’t think it’s healthy.”

Katie Smith, the Leesburg Democratic district chair for Loudoun Democrats, said her role is to support Democratic candidates in whatever way they need and help amplify their messages not just in her district but throughout the County. She helps to host events, door canvassing, texting, etc.

Smith got involved in politics as a teenager growing up in Washington, D.C. “It’s kind of hard to escape the interest there,” she chuckled. “Certainly since 2016 it started occurring to me that our elections really, really matter. Before that if my candidate didn’t win I’d be sad for a day, but my life didn’t change materially at all. Now it is.”

She says she holds dear a quote from the Nuremberg trials which stated how what happened in Germany and the Holocaust had much to do with a lot of bad people doing bad things, but more so a lot of good people doing nothing.

“I will not do nothing,” she reflected.