Greg MacKay | Knox County Election Reform

Prayer:  Matt Hall

Pledge:  Ron Grimm

Terrell Kerr announced the “Celebrate Sound” walk is June 8th at UT Gardens.  The cost is $25 to be a Virtual Walker and you do not have to attend.  The cost to be a Super Walker is $100 and you don’t have to attend for that honor either!  Terrell said they need for people to sign up so please do so soon!

Chris Hoosier introduced his speaker, Greg MacKay, who is speaking on Knox County Election Reform.  Greg thinks we should go to “Voting Centers” to vote and predicts within 10 years we will have voting centers open for 5 days at which to vote.  He also thinks we will move to paper ballots by mail. He says we could vote by computer but too many people worry about fraud. To increase the number of voters who vote, 2 things would work.  1) Election packets and 2) Same day voter registration. He thinks we should have a 10 day early voting period. Our current early voting period is too long. He also thinks we should vote by our social security numbers as we could detect fraud more easily.  He doesn’t think there is much fraud in elections because he has looked for it. As an aside, Greg thinks if a person did something illegal 20 years ago which took away his right to vote, his right to vote should be restored at some point in the future, like possibly 30 years after the illegal act.  Greg said we led the country in early voting in the last election. Early voting is popular here.

Greg was in Russia in March of last year to monitor their elections.  Putin had his opponent arrested and thrown in jail so Putin won the election because his opponent was in prison so therefore he did not qualify to run!  Greg and his team of volunteers did not stop anyone from voting. They just wrote down what they saw and sent it into the Russian government for them to review.  They are always looking for volunteers to go to Russia to monitor elections. Contact OSCE if you are interested. You don’t get paid for it but you get a free airline ticket to Russia!

There were 17 members attending today for The Downtown Sertoma Club and 1 interesting speaker.

John Cogdill has Justin Lafferdy as the speaker next week.