Washington, a charmingly scenic town about 40 miles west of Concord, boasts that it’s the first town in the brand new United States named after George Washington. Its picturesque common is, at 1,507 feet in elevation, the highest town center in the state, and its 1,100 or so hearty residents are scattered around nearly 50 square miles of rugged landscape crisscrossed with rural, often-unpaved roads.
Its Currier and Ives perfection, though, masks the fact that Washington is also home to a nest of criminal scofflaws headed by a ruthless gang leader, one Barbara Gaskell.
At least so the state’s attorney general, Gordon MacDonald, and our secretary of state, Bill Gardner, would have us believe, based on a heavy-handed letter – written in extremely high dudgeon – by Matthew Broadhead, an assistant attorney general, and sent not only to town officials but copied to Gardner.
It fingers Gaskell, Washington’s town moderator, as a villain – at least in the view of a few insular offices in Concord’s state government complex. That is Concord’s always-well-plowed-in-winter state government complex. Her crime? In consultation with other town officials, she postponed the March 13 town election after predictions a major snowstorm would hit that day.
Because you know what’s not always-well-plowed? Picturesque but remote Washington. That’s not an insult to the hard-working road agent in that small town. It’s simply the fact that Washington, thanks to its elevation and geographic location, can get a lot of snow. And a town of 1,100 people spread around nearly 40 square miles cannot afford the plowing power of Concord, a city of about 42,000 largely prosperous souls and a booming commercial and governmental economy.
Heedless – and probably ignorant as well – of the facts on the ground in the town of Washington, state bureaucrats publicly excoriated Barbara Gaskell for doing her job, looking out for the welfare of the voters of Washington. Which, to emphasize the fact, she is legally entitled to do, thanks to both tradition and state law RSA 40:4.
The letter to the town tries to make some sort of nonsensical distinction between an “election day” and a meeting’s “voting day,” insisting that an “election day” is the in the strict purview of the secretary of state’s office and the town is responsible only for the “voting day.”
It then charges that – thanks to “the conduct of Ms. Gaskell” in “unlawfully postponing” the election – the town’s election had “sufficient deficiencies” to risk the “disenfranchisement of voters” and “additional election law violations.” Her conduct, the letter maintained, “could constitute ‘official misconduct’ … punishable as a misdemeanor,” although state officials are magnanimously “foregoing prosecution … at this time.” Italics added by me.
After sentencing Gaskell to the 21st-century equivalent of a public stockade, state bureaucrats informed her and other town officials that a new election will be held at a date chosen by the state and that the secretary of state “will appoint an election monitor to directly observe all aspects of your conduct” in that election.
Yes, an “election monitor”! The sort of thing usually reserved for scofflaw nations considered unlikely to adhere to the law!
The letter said that “in light of the foregoing, we hereby order the Town of Washington to take (a number of steps in) … corrective action.”
Broadhead concludes, ominously, that “continued failure to comply … may result in this office taking action by pursuing criminal prosecution, civil penalties or seeking to remove officials from office.”
Criminal prosecution! For doing her legally authorized job.
I don’t know and have never spoken with Barbara Gaskell, but I assume she is – like the thousands of other conscientious citizens who are the lifeblood of our small towns – doing her best to give back to her community in public service.
New Hampshire’s cities and (especially) small towns could not function without the ordinary people who volunteer long hours to community service on behalf of their fellow citizens. They make the Granite State work. And they deserve our deepest thanks.
They certainly do not deserve to be held up to scorn and accused of criminal misbehavior simply for conscientiously doing their moral and legal duty to their fellow citizens. The public shaming of Gaskell by people who call themselves public servants is unconscionable.