Tomorrow I am interviewing Ellen Kaplan, vice president and policy director for the Committee of Seventy, and it occurred to me that it is worth posting just on the organization.
Seventy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit political group, has been a self-proclaimed political watchdog for Philadelphia since 1904. For every election, the group trains and organizes hundreds of volunteers to inspect voting machines and patrol polling places, acting as mediators in thousands of disputes.
I should know. I worked as a policy intern there for nearly a year and have worked with each of their election campaigns since the November 2004 general election. Perhaps the excitement of Pennsylvania’s swing-state status in a battle between eventual Presidential victor George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry got me hooked.
Continue reading The Committee of Seventy: a century-old political watchdog