It took Edythe Harris just five minutes Friday morning to walk from her car into Greenfield Town Hall, collect a ballot in the town clerk’s office, vote in a makeshift booth in the hallway, beside the giant mural, “The Green Field” — and have it collected, along with 750 or so other early ballots.
“It’s just easier. You come in here, there are no lines,” she said as she dashed outside. “Plus, you may have something else planned that day.”
“You should have been here earlier,” Town Clerk Deborah Tuttle says. A flurry of early voters has been greeting her regularly when she opens for business at 8:30 each morning.
Early voting in Greenfield Town Hall has been steady, with maybe 7 percent of the town’s 11,981 registered voters having already cast ballots before this morning’s special voting session even gets under way bright and early at 8 o’clock.
Twenty of the 26 towns in Franklin County — including tiny Monroe, with fewer than 75 registered voters, are planning special Saturday registration hours as apart of a new effort to step up total turnout.
“I’m super pleased I could do this,” said Jan Puchalski, another early voter on Friday who won’t be able to get to the polls on Election Day, Nov. 8. “This works really well.”
Town clerks agree this year’s experiment with early voting in Massachusetts has been running smoothly.
“It’s a good experience, although it’s more work for me and my staff,” said Tuttle, whose office received a $1,000 grant from the Secretary of State’s Office for the extra effort. “We’re doing nothing but early voting,” she said, then admitting that, yes, the staff also is issuing birth and death certificates and that sort of thing.
Many of the early voters, she said, are seniors who would prefer to avoid the long walk through the high school parking lot and back to vote on Election Day, along with waiting on lines at the polls.
“Man, we’ve been inundated,” said Shelburne Town Clerk Joseph Judd, who single-handedly helped 58 of the town’s 1,407 voters cast ballots in the first day Monday, and has seen a smaller but steady line of eager voters each day that’s followed.
“People are enjoying it,” he said. “They’re exercising the right to vote, and they like the flexibility and being able to get it done and out of the way.”
But as a relatively new town clerk, he admitted, “I find it to be a little daunting. It’s a good learning process.”
In Montague, Town Clerk Debra Bourbeau had more than 100 people show up in her office for the first day of early voting on Monday. There’s been a steady trickle of voters showing up to cast ballots since.
The process involves checking the voter against the computerized voter roll, then handing each one a large envelope to complete and sign, and a ballot to be filled out in a four-compartment decorated “Franklin” voting booth she purchased for the occasion.
The envelope is sealed and placed in a 32-inch-high ballot box that was already half-full by midweek, to be secured in the town vault until Election Day.
“It’s fabulous, we’re just going gangbusters, for us, for Montague,” she said Thursday at midday, with about 5 percent of the town’s 6,300 registered voters already having cast their ballots. “It’s a lot of work. Basically, it’s what we’re doing all day: we’re waiting on people who early vote”
That means it’s cutting into time that her office would be using in the two weeks leading up to an election “to get all of our ducks in a row” — test machines, get ballot boxes ready, print voters lists, delete lists, count ballots.
“We’re no way shape or form even able to do that right now,” said Bourbeau, who was awarded a silver medal from the Secretary of State’s Office along with $500 to help with the election, including having Saturday voting hours today from 8 a.m. to noon and Wednesday evening hours until 6:30.
Having voters cast ballots early may reduce the rush at the polls on Nov. 8, “but we will still be doggone busy,” Bourbeau says, guessing that turnout, which was in the low to mid-70s in the last two presidential elections could reach above 80 percent overall.
“It has everything to do with this election, but with early voting thrown in, people are coming out who wouldn’t ordinarily vote on that day,” she says, “because they’re saying that one day wouldn’t be good for them. This gives them a chance to be flexible.”
If turnout on Election Day slows a bit, that will give poll workers — who will be given the signed, sealed envelopes for their precinct — a chance to check them against their voting lists, cut them open and run them through the ballot box so they can be tallied before polls close.
If poll workers stay too busy to get a head-start running ballots through the counter on Nov. 8, that prep work may have to wait until 8 p.m., slowing up the final tally, Bourbeau admitted.
But she added, “Overall, it’s a great thing. I’m running an election. It’s going to cost me the same amount of money whether people come or people don’t. This is an opportunity to have a bigger turnout. If I’m going to run an election, let’s everybody come out.”
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