Democracy is a sacred trust. Vigilance is needed to keep it viable.

We at The Enterprise cover democracy at the grassroots level — the small towns and local school boards that make decisions close to home, affecting our everyday lives.

Over the decades we’ve been doing this, we’ve witnessed some acts that verge on the miraculous as readers of our news accounts are moved to action. Once, we wrote about an unfinished school track in the Hilltowns — money had run out. Given all the facts, one of our readers who owned a bulldozer decided to act. Neighbors came together and earth — literally — was moved.

To work together, facts are needed. Truth provides the common ground on which different factions can come together to move forward.

Each week, we print this reminder on our opinion pages: Writers are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

We do our best to check the facts and write editor’s notes to allow responses to allegations we have not already covered.

We also require letters to be signed. To our mind, anonymous writers lack accountability.

As November elections loom, we expect more letters. We are pleased to provide a forum where citizens can share their ideas on issues and inform, educate, and influence one another.

We’re disappointed that voters in several Hilltowns will have no real choice. As we’ve written on this page before, choice is essential to democracy.

We’re pleased that Berne voters will have choices — full slates from both the Republicans and Democrats. We welcome and have printed letters from Berne candidates outlining their views on issues.

But we have been troubled by posts on the Berne Republican Facebook page — nasty and unfounded responses to letters we have published. The posts are anonymous.

With a link to one letter we printed, the GOP page calls the letter writer “our Berne town drunk” and advises him, “Go back up to your house and have another drink.”

Linking to another letter we published, the GOP page says to the writer, “You are why we call a bobble head for the King and his little group of soldiers.” And so it goes with other letter writers.

When the County GOP chairman, Randy Bashwinger, formerly Berne’s chairman, too, has called me to complain about particular letters in our newspaper, I have urged him to write his own in response. He has not.

We have an open forum — a place for civil discourse where writers must take responsibility for their words by signing their names. We urge citizens to share their views to move democracy forward.

Why take anonymous, unfounded potshots at our forum and those who honorably use it? Wouldn’t it be more productive to enter the dialogue and use facts to convince voters of your views?

Democracy can be messy. Last week, we covered a school board meeting in Guilderland where about 30 people showed up, upset about a pending requirement that children would have to wear masks to attend school again this year.

We respect those who spoke at the microphone and gave their names as well as their views. But there was a mob mentality at play in the crowd, which doesn’t show up on the recorded videos.

Hecklers, without giving their names, shouted nasty words — some of them with racist undertones — at pro-mask speakers and board members. After my story on the meeting was published the next day, I was called by the wife of a man who had shouted from the crowd; she threatened to contact a lawyer because I had identified and quoted her husband. She noted that her husband had told me not to take his picture — this is true; I have a video of him swiping at me as he said it — and he had not given permission to be quoted or named.

She told me the story should have been about only what was said at the microphone, about the objections to masks. Anyone can listen to that recording on the school board’s website. But that was not the whole story. A journalist doesn’t need permission to report on what is said at a public meeting.

The whole story included inflammatory comments from the crowd, and also threats being made to school board members after the meeting — I have read some of those emails and they are, indeed, threatening.

The problem with a mob mentality is that individuals are not held accountable. As part of an anonymous group — just like the posts on the Berne GOP website — they can say things or do things they would not say if they were in front of a microphone or signing a letter or a post or an email.

Near the end of their meeting, the school board members had a free-ranging discussion about their roles and about the melee at the start of the meeting, which had led them to adjourn for about 10 minutes.

Several board members worried that they had provided a platform for misinformation about masks. That is the very dilemma we, at The Enterprise, face every week as we edit letters. We seek to make sure the facts are right, and then let the opinions flow.

Without being based in truth, an opinion has no merit. Without commonly accepted facts, there is also no way to find common ground, to compromise, to move forward.

We wrote this week about a study, surveying Americans in all 50 states about vaccination against COVID-19. More than half weren’t sure if four false statements about vaccination were true or false. All of them had been debunked: that the vaccine alters DNA, contains microchips to track people, is made from lung tissue of aborted fetuses, or can cause infertility. The researchers documented a link: Those who had the facts right were more likely to get vaccinated.

As we wrote on this page last week, the science around a new virus — whether it involves vaccination or masking — is ever-evolving. It’s hard to stay on top of the latest published, not-yet-peer-reviewed studies. For the last year and a half, we at The Enterprise have tried to do that so our readers would have an accessible source — with links to reliable research — for matters of life and death.

It’s easy to resort instead to relying on partisan news sources and websites or to turn to social media. But, again, if the facts are wrong, the conclusions that follow have no veracity.

Seven Guilderland School Board members put their names on a letter to us last week, which said in part, “Democracy involves emotions and diverse viewpoints. As elected representatives, we are aware that not all community members will agree with every decision that is made.

“We are also aware that the remedy for disagreeing with an elected official is to speak out and ultimately to vote. The remedy is not to threaten, demean, and disrespect.

“This conduct does not serve as a role model for our children of civil discourse or the democratic process.”

We couldn’t have said it better.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor