Annual Town Election Official Results

Thank you everyone for your patience as I finalized our annual town election results!

Some residents have expressed concerns related to an extended timeline in releasing these results. There were several factors leading to the delay:

• Our department is currently understaffed due to an extended leave in the registrar's office. Although we made every effort to keep up (despite being down to only two staff members while running an election and keeping the Town Clerk's office open to the public for the day) without our third "runner", who helps get the numbers from the precincts at the end of the night, we were definitely affected. 
• As you may have heard, some of our precincts ran out of card stock/machine readable ballots.
  • The hand count of some ballots led to an extended evening for our devoted election workers. For reference, we hand counted 113 ballots: Some were due to the machine rejecting our standard ballots, some were the minimal amount of paper ballots that could not be inserted into the machine, and some were received last minute (before 8pm) at the town hall. 
  • Although we ordered a significant number of combined mail in and in person ballots, we were affected by almost 1000 mail in voters not returning their ballots. Many of which, decided to vote at the precincts instead. I would like to add the exciting news that we had a higher turn out this year than our last 4 previous annual elections. (2020 had 2416; 2021 had 1400; 2022 had 530; 2023 had 1801). Moving forward I will keep this in mind and I encourage everyone to keep heading to the polls! 
• There were also an impressive number of write-in votes that require extra attention in tallying at the end of the night. It's great there was so much interest in our open positions. I encourage anyone who may be interested in becoming a more active part of our town to look at our website or reach out to our Select Board Office. They may be able to assist in discovering Boards and Committees seeking members for appointment.

Unrelated to the delay, I was also informed that some residents are curious about my removal of the "Check Out" station during our recent elections. The requirement for check outs were removed several years ago by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I thought eliminating the station would allow more flexibility for some of our election workers to split shifts for a more reasonable day and create an opportunity to have on call workers in the case of last minute call outs. I may choose to reimplement the check out in the future, but it would likely only be to assist with primary elections due to the multiple party ballots. 

If you have further questions, I encourage you to reach out to me at the town clerks office. We value transparency and are always happy to assist. 

Sincerely,

Kris Stinson, Town Clerk

Total Registered Voters: 14419

Total Voters at the Polls: 3681