City and town clerks in Hampshire County agree that the state’s first-ever early voting program was a success, with some communities reporting turnout as high as 36 percent.
But the effort wasn’t without its problems. Long lines kept voters in some communities waiting, while the additional workload led one clerk to say it was as if her town was running two elections.
For the first time in Massachusetts, residents were able to vote on days other than Election Day — for two weeks up until Nov. 4. The number of days and times available for voting differed among communities, though many went beyond the law’s requirements. Some 30 states offer early voting.
South Hadley saw a particularly strong showing of early voters. There, 35.97 percent of the the town’s 11,310 registered voters cast their ballots.
Williamsburg voters showed a similar level of interest, with 31.55 percent of the town’s 2,022 registered voters going to the polls early.
“Overall, I think it was a very positive experience for most of the voters,” Williamsburg Town Clerk Brenda Lessard said.
Granby, too, had high early voting participation. About 31 percent of the town’s 4,665 registered voters participated.
But it “was a lot of work for the clerks,” Town Clerk Katherine A. Kelly-Regan said. “It’s the same as running two elections.”
Easthampton City Clerk Barbara LaBombard agreed. “It was a lot of administrative work — a lot,” she said.
And that work’s far from being over. In Easthampton, the ballots are stored until Election Day, when they will be manually fed into the correct precincts’ voting machines at the city’s two polling places.
LaBombard has two teams of three people who will meet at the Municipal Building at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday. They’ll head to White Brook Middle School and Easthampton High School, where they’ll feed the city’s 2,817 early ballots into voting machines. And that will all happen while residents are voting on Election Day.
LaBombard expects that the ballot-feeding could go beyond the closing of polls at 8 p.m. Tuesday in some Greater Boston communities, which saw huge numbers of early voters, she said. Electronically tabulated results are typically availabe soon after the closing of polls.
“There needs to be a better way to handle the ballots,” LaBombard said. “It’s going to be hard enough for us, but with eastern Mass., the huge number they have, nobody should be expecting results at 8:05 in the eastern part of the state.”
Brookline, for example, had some 10,000 early voters, she said.
“The ballot-handling is a discussion that needs to be had with the clerks and the state before the next time around,” she said. “It was the first time. Nobody knew what to expect … we’ve got two years and we’ll see what can be figured out.”
The newness of early voting drew some skepticism of the voting process in Williamsburg, Lessard said, where more than one early voter wondered about a “rigged” election.
Lessard had someone ask her how many dead people are on the town’s voter rolls (there’s one), while others pondered whether their ballot would end up in a wastebasket (they won’t).
“I did have people tell me they’re going to come and try to vote again,” she said.
Lessard chalks it up to the frequency of Donald Trump’s comments about a possibly “rigged system.”
“I just think there was so much negativity about the voting process,” she said. “We try to do the best we can. I think people should embrace their election workers instead of criticize them … it’s not rigged.”
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com