The following was posted on the League Leaders list of the LWV of Massachusetts by Lynn Cohen, LWV of Westford. It is reprinted with her permission.
This article in the New Republic, headlined Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance, begins this way:
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.”
“That truism has been repeated by notables from Gen. Jim Mattis to Barack Obama to George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. But it’s fitting that the person credited with first saying it was a private citizen whom nobody particularly remembers.”
“Lotte Scharfman (1928–1970) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who became president of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters. Her cause was an obscure one: She wanted to reduce the size of Massachusetts’s bloated House of Representatives from 240 members to 160. The measure failed on its first vote in the House in 1970, for the obvious reason that no representative wanted to risk losing their own seat. But after several House members were voted out later that year for opposing the reform measure, it cleared the state legislature, and in 1974 it won overwhelming approval from Massachusetts voters.”
One thing the article gets wrong is that there are many of us who remember who Lotte Scharfman was & what she said & did.
And on Boston.com, an article headlined Election experts weigh in on what Trump’s new executive order means for Massachusetts voters, presents several people’s opinions on the president’s recent anti-voter executive order, as LWVUS accurately calls it.
“Whether or not the executive order will stick is currently unknown and will likely depend on what legal challenges are brought before it. Until then, [Ruth] Greenwood [the director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School] said, Massachusetts voters should continue to rely on the same sources as before to ensure that they know their rights.”
“ ‘I would rely on people like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of Massachusetts… to be able to provide accurate information,” Greenwood said. “For now, the law is exactly as it was before the executive order, and people should just continue to trust in the sources that they’ve trusted until now.’ ”
We can agree with that.
