BOSTON — When voters begin casting their ballots at the polls this weekend ahead of the Sept. 1 primary, they’ll be partaking in an early voting method that hit the Bay State a decade ago — the relevance of which some locals clerks now question.
Early in-person voting became an option for voters in 2016, after Gov. Deval Patrick signed a law in May of 2014 applying the practice to biennial state elections only. The law dictated that the early voting period begin 11 business days preceding the election, and required municipalities to have at least one voting site open during normal business hours.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state introduced mail-in voting for all voters — not just for those who fell under the specific requirements necessary to receive an absentee ballot.
Those temporary pandemic-era methods changed the way people approached voting, especially after Gov. Charlie Baker in 2022 signed a law permanently expanding early in-person and mail-in voting to primary and general elections.
The popularity of early in-person voting has decreased over the years, particularly in primary elections, in part due to the surging popularity of mail-in voting. But as voters this election cycle weigh ballot questions allowing people to register and vote on Election Day (Question 4) and substituting an all-party primary in for the traditional party-based primaries (Question 3), early in-person voting remains an enduring and often utilized election reform in Massachusetts.
Local Impacts
While Massachusetts Town Clerks Association President and Easton Town Clerk Danielle Sicard called it “exciting” to see more voting options, she described early in-person voting as “a mini election every day” that includes the preparation, counts and balancing of voting lists for what could be a very small team of election officials in each municipality, while they’re preparing for a 13-hour Election Day and managing mail-in ballots.
“I look at finances and data, and when I see a 3.4% turnout in early in-person voting, that means town halls were open for six hours and saw 20 voters,” Sicard said, referring to the September 2024 primary early voting turnout.
“Staffing for the potential for hundreds because you don’t know and you have to be prepared. And I’m talking about primaries,” Sicard, who has been a clerk for 16 years, said. “I don’t think we should eliminate choices when we’re talking about November elections, but we should limit the number of days so we cut the cost in half.”
Still, 28,908 voters took advantage of early in-person voting to make their voices heard in the 2024 primary elections.
Once early voting takes place this fall, municipalities will be reimbursed for their efforts, Galvin spokesperson Deb O’Malley said, though the exact process has varied over time. In recent years, the secretary of state’s office has a line item within its budget meant for the reimbursements. The reimbursement stems from former Auditor Suzanne Bump’s determination in 2017 that a 2014 early voting law signed by Gov. Deval Patrick was an unfunded mandate. Though in 2018 lawmakers were still hesitant about implementing early voting for primary elections with worries about cost.
The amount that each municipality receives is based on an auditor’s office survey of local officials about costs for things like staffing and postage, O’Malley said. The early voting line item in the current state budget is $6.8 million.
MIT Elections Data and Science Lab Director Professor Charles Stewart told the News Service that early in-person voting “creates administrative burdens for municipalities that have to implement it. Elections are administered by the 351 cities and towns. You have to have early voting set up in every little town, which is problematic given the demand for early voting.”
“There is so little early voting in the primaries and the midterm elections that I’ll go out on a limb and say if Massachusetts only had early voting for presidential years I don’t think it would be tragic. And it would not reduce turnout and it would give relief to the cities and towns of the commonwealth,” Stewart said.
Referring to association data, Sicard said that since the onset of the permanent vote-by-mail method in 2022, early in-person voting for primary elections have seen a 3.4% to 4.6% turnout rate with a median reimbursement cost of $720,000 to communities.
“I like to use this analogy as an example. Let’s look at a fire department. Let’s say we’re going to ask the same two to four firefighters to put out a brush fire for 11 days straight. They can’t tag team, they don’t get a day off, while they’re planning for their largest fire that they get every two years or four years,” Sicard said. “Wouldn’t we expect that at some point there’s going to be a problem?”
While 520,056 voters cast mail-in ballots in the 2024 primaries, early in-person voting remains “a very important element of our elections,” Common Cause Massachusetts Executive Director Geoff Foster said.
“It ensures people can vote at a time that works for their schedule,” he said. “It includes a weekend and weeknight option. People aren’t always working conventional hours.”
“It’s really important that our voting laws can meet people where they’re at in the 21st century,” he said. “I do think if there are conversations around the impact early voting processes might be having on local election officials, that conversation needs to be more about resources and not whether we should be rolling back our voting rights.”
Compared to mail-in voting, early in-person voting also gives voters a longer period of time to study up on candidates, absorb their advertising, and hear directly from them before casting their ballots.
While only briefly, early in-person voting also creates de facto same-day registration in Massachusetts for the primaries, Foster said. Saturday, Aug. 22 is the last day voters can register for the primary and is also the first day of early voting, giving them a one-day window to complete both tasks. In the Nov. 3 general election, there’s a week where the two overlap; the early voting period begins Oct. 17 and runs through Oct. 30, and the voter registration deadline is Oct. 24.
“I think what’s really important is that we continue to see an increase in participation in democracy. You’re hearing, you know, countries overseas where they’re decreasing participation in democracy, and I think it’s really important, regardless of your political persuasion or where you’re at, that we give the most access to people to vote,” Sen. Barry Finegold, who led early voting negotiations in 2014, reflected. “People have incredibly busy schedules, there’s a lot going on, and the easier we can make it for people to participate, I think it’s a win for democracy.”
Looking Back
Gov. Deval Patrick in 2014 said the early voting law, which also instituted online voter registration, “makes our democracy better.” He was backed by Galvin, who pointed out that the law would mean “you don’t need a reason” to vote earlier, as was required under absentee voting prerequisites.
Lawmakers agreed in 2014 to limit early voting to general state elections every two years. The law also authorized 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote, and required post-election audits of voting equipment. During negotiations, conferees dropped a Senate-approved plan to let people register and vote during early in-person voting or on Election Day.
Finegold, then-Senate chair of the Election Laws Committee, said in 2014 that “we focused where we thought the highest turnout would be.”
“It was super hard because, you know, you were really negotiating with five different groups. You had the House, the Senate, the secretary of state, you had the Republicans, you had the governor,” Finegold said. “And then you had all the outside interests.”
Voters cast over one million ballots in the first-ever early in-person voting period leading up to the Nov. 8, 2016 state election, accounting for 30.7% total ballots cast, according to the secretary of state’s website. Voters were able to vote early in a midterm election without providing a reason for the first time in the Nov. 6, 2018 election. Of 2.7 million ballots cast, 21.2%, or over 584,000 of them, were early voting ballots, per state voter statistics.
“Massachusetts, like every other state in New England, had a very conservative set of laws about voting, and New England in general had been very slow to embrace convenience voting, and that was because of constitutional constraints,” Stewart told the News Service. “So the early voting law was an attempt to get around constitutional issues.”
“Voters immediately gravitated towards it because they were already getting around the restrictions,” Stewart said of early in-person voting. “In 2016, and even into 2018, there was quite a lot of usage of it. But once the pandemic came and no excuse absentee voting arrived, voters flooded into voting by mail as opposed to voting early.”
During the pandemic, voting methods “underwent a dramatic change” due to temporary voter laws, per Galvin’s office. Bay Staters could vote in person on Election Day, in person during an early voting period, or by mail. “No-excuse voting by mail” was available for the September primary election and the November general election — a different method than by absentee ballot, which required that voters be either away from their city or town on Election Day, have a religious reason they couldn’t vote at the polls on Election Day, or have a disability that prevented them from voting in person.
Of 1.7 million ballots cast for the Sept. 1, 2020 primary, voting early in-person accounted for 12.2%, mail-in voting sat at 47.7%, and Election Day voting accounted for 40.1% of ballots. Galvin’s statistics show his office accepted over 814,000 ballots by mail and over 208,000 ballots early in-person.
In November 2020, 23.1%, almost 844,000 voters, cast their ballots early in-person; 41.7%, more than 1.5 million voters, mailed their ballots; and 35.2% cast them on Election Day, totaling to over 3.6 million ballots.
When Baker signed an elections reform bill in June of 2022, he ushered into law a permanent system of no-excuse early voting by guaranteeing the right to vote early or by mail in state elections and state primaries. The law requires that early voting begins 17 days before the election for state biennial elections — lasting for 14 days — and 10 days before the election for presidential or state primaries. The law also moved the deadline for prospective voters to register from 20 days before Election Day to 10 days out.
“Early voting has generally dropped significantly since people started voting by mail,” O’Malley told the News Service. “It’s just shifting. People who want to vote before Election Day are just doing it a different way. It’s become less common to vote on Election Day since they have all the options.”
“It could still change, we’re still learning,” O’Malley continued. “This is our first, really, post-COVID midterm election, and I can’t compare a midterm election to a presidential election — the equivalent would be four years prior, and four years ago we were still changing our laws.”
While people may not be voting in person early as much as they once did, Finegold said, “When it comes to participation in democracy, I still believe we want to give every avenue possible for people to participate. Could there be some tweaks in the future? Sure. But I do believe the fact that we allow people to vote early, that we allow people to vote by mail, has enhanced democracy and improved people’s ability to participate in the process.”
Mail-in and early in-person voting also has an impact on campaigning, Suffolk Poll Director David Paleologos noted.
“Early voting rewards the candidates who are most organized at the local level, at the precinct level,” Paleologos said. “We have a Senate race coming up. One of the things we’ll be tracking is how early are voters breaking? Because a large share of voters vote early either by mail or in person.”
Even though most voting will take place on Election Day, “if some candidate banks an early lead, there’s no persuasion left,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to change that person’s vote, they’ve voted. So it becomes a smaller pool of persuadables.”