County Republican Central Committee. Was Executive Committee for about a year about 2 years ago, but that's technically not elected by voters.
Oh yeah, interesting story. I may've shared this before, so forgive me, I'm middle-aged.
In my sophomore year of college I get my absentee ballot for Allegheny County, PA. I fill out the blanks and see there're no candidates running for "Inspector of Elections" in my ward; only a write in line. So, I write myself in and think nothing more about it.
That is until a couple weeks later I get a call from my Dad who--his voice replete with "what have you gotten yourself into now?" tone--tells me they got a letter from the Board of Elections advising me I'd been elected Inspector of Elections for my ward.
So my first step: What the hell is an Inspector of Elections and what does it do?
Turns out it was just an elected poll watcher. I would go with the geriatric old ladies who volunteer for the polls every year, help them set up the machines, process voters, tabulate the results, etc. It was a long day starting about an hour before polls opened until an hour after they closed, with no breaks. However, I recall that the payment was straight cash (WTF?!? This was in a white collar suburb in the late 80's and early 90's, so this was probably a remnant of old-fashioned machine politics by ward heelers). So without having to declare taxes, it actually averaged enough per hour to make it pretty worthwhile compared to McDonald's or the like.
My first day there I was asked to sign an oath stating that I was not, nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party, and further that I didn't support ideas denigrating the American way of life or some vastly over-broad anti-free speech bull$hit like that. Now, I've never been a Communist, but the language was so grossly over-broad it offended my sense of free speech and the right to dissent.
So I refused to sign.
The dear old biddies working the polls with me didn't have a clue what to do. This had never happened. They discussed it twittering among themselves in a corner for a while. Then one of them made a call to the Board of Elections. Soon after they came back and said, "OK, he doesn't have to sign it". The next few years it was a ritual that I'd get there, we'd pass around the forms, I'd politely not sign it and they didn't ask. They were actually nice ladies.
A day or two later I called the Pittsburgh chapter of the ACLU to register a complaint about the language surely being over-broad and violative of the First Amendment. They said they'd look into it, but I never heard back. Fast forward about 4 years to my first summer home from law school where I was volunteering with the same ACLU office. The office manager was looking for work I could do and, lo and behold, found my complaint which had been left moldering in a file the past few years.
I worked with a volunteer lawyer from the community at researching the matter. We discovered the law was, unsurprisingly, passed around 1953 during the height of the McCarthy scare. What we were surprised to find, though, was that the offending language had been
repealed around 1967, and replaced with standard (and non-objectionable IMHO) oaths to support the Constitution and not support removing the government with armed violence. Yes, the Allegheny County bureaucracy had yet to update the oath forms more than
20 years after the language had been repealed! Grumps, Cynic, and other Forumites from Da Burgh can surely understand this phenomena.
The lawyer wrote a letter to Election Board pointing out the language used in their forms, in addition to being of dubious constitutionality, had been legally void for a quarter century. I heard later they finally removed that McCarthyist language from their forms, and thus legally caught up to the late 60's. Justice will out!
