MEMPHIS, TN (abc24.com) - Old folks vote. The seniors understand the importance of going to the polls. It’s a right they cherish and quite frankly, enjoy. Shawn Leary of The Glenmary at Eastover nursing home drives a small van, and on Wednesday, he took a handful to vote. “It wasn’t really busy at all,” Leary said, “...and I only had eighteen people.”
He took them to the Mississippi Boulevard Church polling place where they’ve voted for years. This time, however, they weren’t greeted with open arms by the poll manager. “She was, like, waving us away,” Leary said. “She told us there’s no waiting at this other location, over at Poplar and Evergreen and we needed to go there. She acted like we couldn’t bring the seniors here.”
She is the manager of the polling station. She never told us her name. The folks at Glenmary know her, though. Boy, do they know her. After Shawn Leary dealt with her, Activities Manager Nancy Jordan got a phone call. “It was ugly and nasty,” Jordan said. “She had no business calling me at all. All I wanted to do was bring my senior citizens up here to vote.”
They both pointed her out, and we headed her way. We had a few questions, one of them obviously was why would she treat anybody badly who wanted to vote. We never got an answer. After saying, “I can’t talk to you; I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she picked up her cell phone, made a call, and headed to a back office where she closed the door.
We were finally told to talk with Shelby County Elections Administrator Richard Holden. He’s looking into what happened, he said, adding, “We certainly would not encourage our election officials to be discourteous to any voter because every vote is just as important as the other.”
The eighteen seniors did vote at Mississippi Boulevard. Jordan and Leary both said other poll workers were very courteous to the seniors.
