Remembering Barbara Neubert, Williamsburg’s first female mayor

Barbara Neubert was a fire cracker.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

While she may have been small in stature, that little lady packed quite a bit of energy in a small package.

Barbara was a fixture in the Williamsburg community for what seemed like forever. She was a smart, classy lady, who you often saw walking around town and usually at a pretty swift pace.

We were both members of the Williamsburg Kiwanis Club for a while, and she was always fun to talk to. She and former Williamsburg Superintendent Jake Mountjoy sitting at the same lunch table at Kiwanis always made for an interesting time…LOL.

Barbara also served as the bookkeeper for the Whitley County Public Library for several years, including part of the time when I served on the library’s board of directors. She maintained that position until a fall forced her to go into the nursing home.

She passed away at the Williamsburg Health and Rehabilitation Center Saturday at the age of 89.

While I hated to hear about Barbara’s passing, something tells me that she is probably much more at peace today than she was sitting in a nursing home, or sitting very long anywhere for that matter.

My condolences go out to her family.

Now to touch on a few other topics before I conclude this column.

• In this country today, there is not much that conservatives and liberals can agree upon. I think I can speak for nearly everyone though, when I say how thrilled I am that all the election ads are over. Thank goodness.

• Speaking of the election, about the only thing good that has come from COVID-19 this year has been early voting in Kentucky. This is great for people, who have to work for a living.

In Whitley County we had about five weeks of it for the primary election, and for Tuesday’s General Election we had three weeks of early voting, which included having early voting on the three Saturdays before the election.

Over a third of Whitley County voters had already cast their ballots prior to Election Day Tuesday.

I have yet to speak to a single person from either political party, who didn’t like the early voting option. We already have in-person absentee voting available in Kentucky for those, who will be “unable” to go to the polls on Election Day because they are either out of state or unable to get to the polls that day.

Changing the law to allow early in-person voting for every election in Kentucky would be a great idea that I think would draw bi-partisan support.

• Every election, there is increasing talk about foreign interference and possible tampering with voting machines. There is an easy way to take voting machine tampering concerns out of the equation with a few changes to the law. Allow me to explain.

A change to the law that I would love to see made is requiring every county to use voting equipment like Whitley County uses. People mark paper ballots and then load those into a voting machine where the results are scanned and tallied. The ballots are kept in order to maintain a paper trail.

I would love to see this change implemented so that there is a paper trail for every vote cast. If this change were to happen, then I would love to see the Kentucky General Assembly follow it up with a requirement that each county board of election randomly audit say 5 percent of the voting precincts after the election by going through and hand counting all the paper ballots in those precincts in order to ensure that the machine total matches what the hand count is.

This would make it very difficult to rig voting machines without getting caught, and it would give the public confidence that every vote was being counted as it should. As the old expression goes, trust but verify.

• There is a certain irony that never escapes me during the presidential election in particular. The presidential race is the one election that the overwhelming number people will go vote in, and it is also the one election that they can have the least impact on.

Democracy works best when voters educate themselves, and go vote. This is something that I wish everyone would do for every election. Sadly, they won’t.