Philadelphia's nut-and-bolts voting expert says good-bye

If you're an ordinary Philadelphia voter, you go to the polls once or twice a year, and the experience is routine: The poll workers find your name among the registered voters, ask you to sign in, and take you to a voting machine, where you duck under a curtain, push buttons for your candidates, open the curtain, and go on about your business for the next six months.

If there's a single person to thank for that routine, it's someone most Philadelphians have never heard of: Robert Lee Jr., officially listed on the city payroll as "voter registration administrator," but unofficially, the guy who has been minding the nuts and bolts of the city election machinery since the 1980s.

Lee had bosses - the city commissioners, especially chairwoman Marge Tartaglione, the leader of the city commissioners since the mid-1970s, who lost her reelection bid in May. But it was Lee who handled the details of the city's transition from mechanical to digital voting machines and brought in a new imaging system to keep track of voter signatures, among other accomplishments.

"He was the blood and guts of that department," said a former colleague, Bill Rubin, now a City Council candidate. Lee retired last month, several weeks after his 60th birthday. He'll collect a pension of close to $72,000 annually, but he is walking away from nearly $250,000 in potential deferred-retirement payments after signing up for the DROP program just last year. It appears that he has taken Tartaglione's defeat as a personal affront, that he holds reporters at least partly responsible, and that he has no desire to continue in the job under new bosses.

Lee refused to say anything about his departure to the reporters he had helped for years, explaining the intricacies of the election process, from voter registration through vote counts. "I'm a private citizen now," he told The Inquirer recently. "I don't have to talk to you." - Bob Warner
Where to for Occupiers?

Where will the Occupy Philadelphia protesters go when construction crews start moving in December to begin renovation of Dilworth Plaza, headquarters of the anti-Wall Street movement?

No one knows, and it's not clear that the protesters have agreed to move. Brian Abernathy, chief of staff to city managing director Richard Negrin, said Occupy Philadelphia participants had agreed from the beginning to pack up their tents and take them somewhere else when the $50 million remake of Dilworth begins.

And Robyn Mello, 24, from South Philadelphia, an Occupy Philadelphia protester involved in a group in charge of education, media, and messaging, said she was confident the occupation would continue.

The group will "find a new place close by, a large place where people would know who we are," Mello said.

But Occupy Philadelphia's Facebook page says only that the group has agreed to talk to the city about moving. On Friday, New York City officials, fearing an ugly confrontation between police and protesters, reversed plans to move demonstrators and clean their encampment at Zuccotti Park. - Quan Nguyen and Miriam Hill