As the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump nears, the power of voting — and efforts to strip away this essential right — have come under a national spotlight. Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if not elected in November, instead saying, “We’re going to have to see what happens” in response to a reporter’s question earlier this week. And amid the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety over mail-in ballots and voter disenfranchisement is running high.
At the center of it all, town and city clerks around the county are ramping up their work trying to ensure that all votes are received and counted.
When gathering results from August’s primary election, the Gazette noticed that among the 20-plus clerks we contacted in the area, most, if not all, appeared to be women — an observation that resonated with us and felt all the more meaningful in light of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, a landmark victory for women’s suffrage.
As Easthampton clerk Barbara LaBombard put it, “I think of those women back then and how, if they were to look 100 years forward and see how many election administrators were women … I think it would make them say, ‘Wow, what we’re doing made a difference.’”
The amendment allowed many women to vote for the first time in the United States, though some — particularly Black women — still faced significant barriers, such as poll taxes, literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise Black people. While significant progress has been made since the imperfect beginnings of the 19th Amendment, major obstacles, including voter ID laws and inaccessible polling locations or hours, remain barriers for many voters.
With these considerations in mind, the Gazette spoke with six local town and city clerks about how they entered their line of work, the role of women in local government, and what it’s like preparing for an election that is anything but ordinary.
When Kristen Estelle got a phone call in 2014 offering her the job of assistant town clerk, “I couldn’t believe my ears,” she recalled. Her family has a long history in the town clerk’s office — her great-great grandfather, great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and great-uncle were all the Goshen town clerk.
She started as assistant town clerk and in 2018 became town clerk.
“I love so many aspects of it,” Estelle said of the part-time position. “The record keeping is right up my alley. Anyone who knows me knows I have kept a daily diary for nine years now,” she said. “Just the vitals, statistics, are so interesting to me. I love to see a birth certificate show up on my counter.”
After town hall closed due to the pandemic, “I was meeting couples out in the parking lot to issue their marriage licenses,” Estelle said. “It is an important job in its own small way, and I love to be a part of people’s lives in that way.” There have been four marriages logged since March, “which is pretty high for Goshen,” she noted.
As a lifelong resident of Goshen, Estelle knows many of the people who come into her office. “And if I don’t know them,” she said, “I know their son, or I know their mom.” She currently lives at her family’s homestead, which was built in 1853.
Coincidentally, her current office is inside the building where she attended elementary school, “specifically the room where I attended kindergarten,” said.
She and her assistant, Gina Papineau, spent 12 hours sending out their first set of mail-in ballots — a lot more work, but a process Estelle said she fully supports. This fall’s election is “definitely the biggest challenge I have faced so far as town clerk,” she said. “I’m deeply aware of people’s uncertainly and nervousness surrounding the election and the process of it. And so, my main goal has been to communicate clearly about how people can vote.”
Because of her profession, Estelle doesn’t talk about her political opinions publicly. She does, however, note the significance of doing this particular job this particular year, 100 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
“It is exciting to be a part of the election with this big anniversary,” Estelle said. She has her great-grandfather Paul Packard’s diary, which contains some notes about women, including his wife, Ethel, first voting in Goshen. On Nov. 2, 1920, he wrote: “Election Day. We went up to vote. First time for Ethel (age 22).”
If you call the Northampton clerk’s office and try to talk politics, Powers has a response ready: “My blanket statement is, we don’t talk politics. So I’m sorry, that’s not my role.”
“I’m allowed to speak my mind as an elected official,” she said. “I can certainly promote any sort of opinion. But I really don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think this position, as far as I’m concerned, should try to persuade people to vote one way or another or promote the agenda of a political party.”
Powers, a Florence resident, grew up in Granby and started as assistant city clerk in 2011. “I actually got my masters in business many moons ago,” she said. “This job seemed to be a good fit with what my skills were and what my education was and what my training had been in the past.”
The job is detail-oriented and involves working with people, whether registering them to vote or issuing them a marriage certificate. “I’ve just really loved working with the public,” she said. “It’s very interesting work — you learn a lot about the history of the city by being a part of this office. There’s a lot to learn about Northampton.”
The clerk may be one of the oldest positions in city government, she noted. “Really, it was the clerk who recorded a lot of the details before leaders were hired in other municipal positions. All of that is described in some of our books that we have here.” For instance, Powers has books of voter registration logs, one book for women and one for men, which the city kept separate until at least 1937.
“We have old military records. We have old memorabilia from different events that have happened throughout the city,” she said. There’s also documentation of all the births, marriages and deaths in Northampton going back to 1654. “It’s just a treasure trove of the history of Northampton in this office.”
Since March, Powers has been continuing to work in the office, as she needs to be in person for a lot of her work. She’s gearing up to send out more than 10,000 mail-in ballots to voters once they arrive. “We’re going to have to work pretty fast and diligently to get those ballots out the door and into voter hands in a timely fashion,” she said. “The volume is what’s really crazy — it’s the volume that makes it so different.”
Outside of the office, Holyoke City Clerk Brenna Murphy McGee often finds herself convincing others to vote — not just for high-turnout events such as the presidential election but for municipal elections, which often record lower voter engagement.
In local elections, voters “are going to be electing the people who have the most say in our everyday ordinances that are passed,” Murphy McGee said, “and everything that’s passed in a City Council can affect our daily lives.”
Murphy McGee, who was born and raised in Holyoke, is the second woman city clerk in Holyoke after the previous clerk, Susan Egan, held the position for over 20 years.
The office staff has “definitely been pretty consumed by elections this year,” Murphy McGee said. In addition to coordinating a higher percentage of mail-in ballots, some staff members also have children attending school from home, adding an “extra step of craziness.”
Murphy McGee has tried to stagger staffing as much as possible to keep the office under 25% capacity. But during the election itself, she said, staffing will need to be “all hands on deck with social distancing measures.”
Beyond election duties, Murphy McGee said that many people don’t realize how far a clerk’s role extends beyond matters such as issuing certificates and licenses. The office also assists residents with genealogy research, for instance — prior to the pandemic, the office kept hours where people could come in and look through family indexes.
Lisa Stratford was asked to fill the role of Leverett town clerk in 1997, and initially the job description “meant nothing to me,” she said. Stratford had graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with plans to be an elementary school teacher and knew little of what the clerk’s job would entail.
Twenty-three years later, Stratford still holds the position, which she now sees as a major responsibility that “takes a lot of resilience.”
“The burden of making sure that someone can carry out their constitutional right to vote is big,” she said.
Though she is her office’s only employee, Stratford turns to a team of volunteers for assistance. She’d long anticipated a high voter turnout in the upcoming presidential election, she said, but the pandemic has “quadrupled” the complications.
Outside of work, Stratford said that she doesn’t spend much time encouraging others to vote, aside from her own two grown children. That’s partly due to her desire to maintain work-life balance, Stratford said, but with Leverett residents in particular, she doesn’t see a huge need for this extra push. Out of the town’s most recently recorded population of 1,861, about 1,500 residents are also registered voters.
“To have 1,500 registered voters in a town that size means pretty much just the kids in the elementary school aren’t registered,” Stratford said with a laugh. “But I will catch up with them!”
With a background in finance and banking and Select Board experience behind her, Carlene Hamlin expected the role of town clerk to be an easy fit for her.
“Little did I know that being a clerk was a huge responsibility,” Hamlin said, but “I took the reins and have loved the position ever since.”
After more than a decade in the role — and more than 30 years involved in municipal government — Hamlin said that she is still learning, but that’s a good thing.
“My mantra has always been, ‘If you’re not learning, then you’re not doing good by your citizens,” she said.
Hamlin is one of nine clerks to sit on the Massachusetts Town Clerks Association Legislative Committee, where she noted she works with both men and women to pass legislation on important issues such as mail-in voting.
Presidential elections are always challenging, Hamlin said. But since the pandemic struck in March, staff have been hard at work with outreach and education campaigns, a partnership with the postmaster and other measures to make voting as accessible as possible.
“This is a big election,” Hamlin said, “and we want to make sure people are armed and able to make a good decision.”
“They always say being a clerk is an accidental profession,” Barbara LaBombard says. “I really think that’s true for almost all of us. You don’t go to school to do this.” Earlier in her professional life, LaBombard was a reporter at the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram, where she wrote about Granby, Easthampton and Southampton. She started working in the clerk’s office in 1983 as assistant city clerk. “I always say I moved from one side of the counter to the other.”
The Easthampton resident has been in the office ever since, eventually moving up to city clerk. “I’ve been clerk since ’94, so that’s 26 years,” she said, noting that she can’t think of any city employee with a longer tenure: nearly 37 years.
“The job is very different from when I first started,” she said. “We didn’t even have computers … Now we have one typewriter on the counter that we use once in a while” for forms such as marriage certificates.
As an election administrator, LaBombard talks about voting outside of the office with friends and colleagues. “I can’t leave it here,” she said of her work. “We’ve got a Facebook group, and we are always sharing information and talking about stuff … there are friends of mine who will be very glad when November is over so they don’t need to listen to me.”
LaBombard may talk about voting a lot, but she doesn’t make her political opinions public. “I don’t think any of us would ever have a political sign on our lawn,” she said of her fellow clerks. “While we may talk personally within our friend circles, we all try to be as neutral as possible.”
Heading toward the presidential election amid the pandemic, this election season is particularly busy. “I know that myself and my fellow clerks, we’re all working very hard and doing everything that we can do to make it safe and secure and every ballot be counted,” she said. “We all are checking dropboxes … We all want it to go well and everyone’s vote to be counted.”
LaBombard, for one, will be voting in person this November. “I always vote at the polls — I like to use the machine,” she said. “I’m there anyway.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.