Precinct captains play an important role in local politics, connecting people to party leadership.
They promote voter registration, work to encourage early voting, and support election day processes. Captains provide important information to their constituencies about candidates running for office and burning issues that may affect the lives of voters.
In the upcoming primary on Tuesday, May 3, Democratic voters living in the 440th Precinct, which includes most of the village north of Dayton Street, will vote for borough captain.
Yellow Springs traditionally votes for Democratic candidates, while most other communities in Greene County lean Republican. Two Yellow Springs residents are vying for the job: incumbent Shonda Sneed is running against challenger Lindie Keaton.
The two candidates were recently interviewed by the News.
Shonda Sneed
Precinct Captain Shonda Sneed graduated in 1984 from Yellow Springs High School and has lived in the village for more than 50 years. After serving as precinct captain for eight years, Sneed is seeking a third term. Sneed, a utility pole distribution designer with an engineering background, said her second love – politics – was instilled in her at an early age by her parents, who were active in the suffrage movement. 1950s and 1960s.
“They taught me that if you don’t know your past, your past is bound to repeat itself, and that’s something that’s always been etched in my mind,” she said.
Sneed worked on voter registration efforts as a volunteer for Ohio’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns for Barack Obama and for Sherrod Brown’s 2012 run for the U.S. Senate. Sneed said his organizing efforts to oversee canvassers helped Brown’s polls.
“In our region, I talked about it. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but 3%… in a red state,” she said.
Sneed is concerned about what is widely seen as concerted efforts by Republican officials to roll back the right to vote, and saw the first rumblings of the crackdown efforts in 2010. She began volunteering with organizations that advocated voters’ rights.
“Now we are fighting against people who are withdrawn from the [voter] roles, fights [Republicans] change polling places and fight against shrinking early voting options,” she said, adding that she “warned people in 2020 about the voter restriction shenanigans.”
Sneed said she does not limit her work to just residents of her neighborhood and, during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak during the summer of 2020, spoke at several Yellow Springs Speaking rallies. Up for Justice on threats to voters’ rights, and to encourage early voting. She also made herself available to help people get to their polling stations.
“I advised against mailing ballots and offered to drive people to polling stations to drop them off,” she said.
Another passion for Sneed is health, having lost a brother to colon cancer in 2004. His brother’s illness and the family’s struggles to get adequate support for his brother led Sneed to advocate for health care.
“I was very close with my brother, so I wanted to do something,” she said.
According to Sneed, precinct captains provide an important community service by educating the public about their rights as voters.
“There are people who have busy lives, there are people who have two or three jobs – we are a place where they can go for voter education,” she said.
Many of Sneed’s efforts have helped elect state Supreme Court justices – something she’s proud of, because “there’s no ‘D’ or ‘R’ next to their names on the ballots. vote,” she said.
She named a litany of issues that, if elected, she would like to educate voters on, including women’s reproductive rights and living wages.
“There are people in our community who have housing affordability issues. The people we appoint – their decisions affect us,” she said. “I want to run on my record – a lot of people know me as the person who registers people to vote, and that I care about their issues. Even if you’re not in my neighborhood, I’ll sit down with you and talk to you about the issues.
Lindie Keaton
Keaton’s bid for precinct captain is his first bid for office in Greene County. Keaton, 54, grew up just down the street in Springfield but came to Yellow Springs for doctor visits growing up.
“My pediatrician was in Yellow Springs, and it was a big deal to come to Yellow Springs and stop by Young,” she said.
An educator who taught in Springfield city schools for the first decade of her career, Keaton said she quit teaching for a time when her son was born and moved to Yellow Springs in 1999.
“Yellow Springs seemed like a good place to be a single mom,” she said.
Keaton concocted a series of jobs, including becoming a volunteer at VISTA. She worked with Yellow Springs Home, Inc. and eventually purchased the first home built by the organization. She returned to teaching and is now in her 16th year as a kindergarten teacher at the school in Antioch.
Keaton said she added her candidacy to her list of things she could do to change the world when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, and became more aware of how politics works and started to become more active.
“My big concern is that we have one party in our state as well as in our county, and I think that breeds corruption and insensitivity to the real needs of the community,” she said. “We saw it in HB 616, and things have gotten worse since 2016. We need a really strong Democratic Party, and we need more people to get involved. I would even say that in the last two months there has been an even more dangerous turn of extremism.
HB 616, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is making the rounds in the Ohio state legislature and would make it illegal for teachers to use a curriculum with roots in “a subject based on sexual orientation or gender identity that is not Age Appropriate.”
Keaton believes building a stronger Democratic Party in Ohio starts from scratch.
“Greene County is not a specific anomaly in Ohio, but you have to do it at the neighborhood level,” she said.
Keaton pushed for redistricting and criminal justice reform in his neighborhood and other communities. She was also a block contact for her neighborhood during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. She volunteered for the telephone campaign to recruit voters for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s Georgia senatorial campaigns in 2020.
Keaton is an advocate of a campaign process known as deep canvassing and said it involves more than just handing people a list and encouraging them to vote.
“It’s not just precinct captains giving information to voters, but also getting information from voters, and even other people in your neighborhood,” she said.
Keaton said she enjoys talking to people and would see her role as precinct captain as that of a facilitator, which is also her approach to teaching. She said the process requires building deeper relationships, “learning about people’s life experiences, asking what their needs are, because sometimes leadership is very disconnected from people’s lives.”
Keaton said she will also work in conjunction with other constituency captains, adding that there are several constituency seats open in other areas.
“Yellow Springs is strong enough, we can rely on the village for Democratic votes, but working across the county would be the other piece,” she said.
According to Keaton, she would bring a new perspective to the office. “I haven’t been deeply involved in the Democratic State Central Committee, so I think I’m a new voice,” Keaton said.
Keaton said there were three contested precinct captain elections in the county, which is unprecedented.
“I’m glad there’s still that energy there, and I think it’s a really good sign for the county,” she said. “I understand we won’t lose these people, we’re all on the same side so we’ll end up with so many constituencies covered. I’m pretty optimistic and glad I’m not the only one feeling this call to move on ‘before.
