Editorial: Bad Spa City civics lesson

There may be some valid reasons for the Saratoga Springs City School District to reduce the number of polling places for school board elections and budget votes. That doesn’t make it a good idea.

Quite the contrary. At a time when Americans are witnessing attempts to suppress their voting rights across the nation, this proposal is extraordinarily tone deaf.

This comes at a moment, remember, when the Saratoga County Board of Elections has been resisting requests to add a couple of early voting locations to make casting a ballot easier for people in Saratoga Springs and the northern corner of the county. In Rensselaer County, elections officials have brazenly refused to put an early polling place in the north end of Troy, where many low-income Black people live. Albany County, too, has balked at adding an early voting site in the western part of the city.

In the case of the Saratoga Springs City School District, Superintendent Michael Patton suggests reducing the polling places from six to two, moving them from the district’s elementary schools to the middle and high schools instead. His reasoning: Staging six polling places, and getting results from them once they close, is time consuming and confusing. The reduction, according to Assistant Superintendent Tom Hilker, would save about $5,000. And from a safety standpoint, some parents don’t like the idea of all those voters traipsing around elementary schools.

The logistical challenges aren’t persuasive; the district has long handled elections just fine. If it takes some work, well, democracy is worth it. The savings are paltry in the context of the district’s $134.6 million budget. As for the safety concern, even Mr. Patton acknowledges that there are ways to limit building access and ensure voters don’t wander around the buildings.

Against the negligible benefits is a big potential downside — disenfranchising voters who live more than a short distance from the middle and high schools. The district stretches well beyond Saratoga Springs, reaching as far west as Lake Desolation and north into the town of Wilton. As the Times Union’s Wendy Liberatore found, poll trips that are currently as short as half a mile for some voters would become five miles or more.

Saratoga Parents for Safer Schools, a conservative group, makes some of the same arguments that civil liberties groups are making in Republican-controlled states where tactics like closing polling places are being used to suppress voting in Democratic-leaning areas. In this case, though, the less-affluent outlying areas the group is concerned about tend to vote Republican.

Would voters adapt? Sure, some would, but others would find it difficult to do so, and might very well end up not voting.

The public institutions we entrust to run our democratic mechanisms — whether boards of elections or school districts and boards of education — violate that trust when they take steps that, intentionally or not, curtail the right to vote. Especially in a school system whose mission is to educate the citizens and leaders of tomorrow, that’s a poor lesson in civics.