Gloria Shur Bilchik is an election junkie. She lives in Creve Coeur, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. During decades of political activity, she has been a paid election day poll worker, a campaign staffer in a Missouri State Representative race, a campaign-call-center supervisor, and coordinator of volunteers for the St. Louis County office of a national presidential campaign (Obama ’08). She has canvassed for local and statewide candidates, volunteered on voter-registration drives, letter-writing campaigns and petition-gathering initiatives, and has helped compile and proofread information for voter’s guides. On candidates’ campaign walk lists and on public-opinion pollsters call lists, she is known as a likely voter, because she votes in almost every election.
She is married to Arthur Lieber, who ran for U.S. Congress twice. Even when he’s not on the ballot, the couple’s election-night ritual is to follow returns obsessively on multiple electronic devices. Bilchik shares America’s collective outrage when elections seem unfair, and she mourns and gripes when the results don’t go her way.
In her career as a freelance writer, she has gravitated to stories about voting and elections. She is co-founder and a principal contributor to Occasional Planet, a blog that, since 2010, has offered a platform for writers with politically progressive ideas.