It’s important for Atlanta to take care of parks
Charles Seabrook’s excellent column “Nature helps us get through pandemic,” June 26, focuses today on one of the positive effects of the pandemic that I hope and believe will continue into the future once all of us cooperate in the vaccination effort and reach herd immunity, preventing the dangerous variants from forming.
Fortunately, Atlanta has come a long way since the “Rescue Atlanta’s Parks” effort a decade ago, giving us more parks to go to. But there is more to do as the Trust for Public Land’s recent ranking of cities’ parkland has shown. Not that it is our rank that matters. What matters is that we have parks - all kinds of parks - and that we take care of them so that we can all enjoy a park within a 10 minute walk as well as parks all around the city and across the state.
We have to give our green spaces their due at the same time caring for the green fabric of which we human beings are also a part! Maybe that is what has been happening? We are realizing what is truly important.
ALIDA C. SILVERMAN, ATLANTA
Purge of voter rolls is not some vast conspiracy
In reply to the letter-writers’ question of why purge the voter rolls, “State shouldn’t purge people from voting rolls,” June 30, I say why would you not?
An example of 100,000 names purged would reveal that 67,286 were purged because the submitted an change of address form to the Post office, another 34,227 were purged because mail from the Elections board came back as ‘return to sender’, and only 300 were purged because the had not voted for two general elections and did not respond to an inquiry from the elections board. In addition another 18,486 were removed because of data that they had died.
This is not some vast conspiracy; this is reasonable upkeep of the voter rolls to reduce the potential for fraud and prevent voting in two locations and voting for the deceased.
MICHAEL G. MITCHELL, MARIETTA