The Tool the Committee Should Be Using Before March

To my fellow members of the Sullivan County GOP.

We put real effort into knocking doors and turning out votes, and far less into the thing that quietly decides most local races before anyone knocks a door: who controls the information. A tool now sitting on every laptop can change that, and we should build it into our work between now and the March elections.

Start with Claremont. The school district opened the year with a deficit it could not measure for weeks, finally confirmed at $5.01 million. To keep the doors open, the board borrowed $4 million against state aid that had not yet arrived, cash fell below $200,000 against a budget near $39 million, thirty-nine positions were cut, and the superintendent resigned. Every one of those facts came from documents the district was already required to publish under the Right-to-Know law. The information was never hidden. It was simply unreadable.

That is the whole game, and it is not unique to Claremont. Gaetano Mosca said it plainly a century ago: an organized minority always beats a disorganized majority, and the minority’s advantage is coordination, not virtue. The few win by controlling the agenda, the expertise, and the flow of information. For most of our lifetimes that advantage was permanent, because reading a four-hundred-page packet or a three-hour meeting recording was a full-time job no volunteer could take on.

Artificial intelligence changes the arithmetic. A model grounded in the district’s own records, required to attach the exact source quote to every figure and to leave a blank rather than guess, will turn a budget PDF into a clean worksheet in minutes and flag the odd lines for you.

Here is one of them, from the district’s own General Fund Expenditures Report dated September 30, posted in the October 15 board packet. District-wide electricity: $12,000 budgeted, roughly $140,000 already committed. The report’s own balance column prints it as negative 1,067 percent. I am not alleging a crime, and there may be an explanation. The point is that no resident could have found that line a year ago, and now any of us can, in an evening.

A finding like that is not the end of the work. The board can ignore public comment, and usually does. So we do not aim at the board. We aim past it, at the residents watching on CCTV and online. We clip the strongest minute and put it in front of the voters who decide the March school and municipal seats across our towns. Those low-turnout March elections are the soft point in the entire structure. They are won by whoever shows up organized, and for once we can be that side. The same findings become warrant articles at the deliberative session.

That is what I mean by a counter-elite. Not a slogan, but a working group of liberty-minded residents who can read any budget in the county and turn what they find into clips, candidates, and warrant articles.

When someone answers that the real fix is more state money and tighter oversight from Concord, two facts settle it. Claremont’s per-pupil spending rose about forty-one percent in six years, to $23,288, and the hole opened anyway, so more money did not buy competence. And handing the schools to the state does not remove the organized few. It moves them to an office you cannot reach on a Wednesday night.

Here is the ask. I run a free course that teaches the whole workflow, from the public record to the flagged line to the finished clip. There is no charge. Email me at Kevin.Tyson@gmail.com and I will schedule a session with you. If a dozen of us take it before March, we will stop reacting to the next budget and start writing the warrant articles.