Acknowledging issues within the Massachusetts election, Pamela Wilmot, the manager director of Widespread Trigger Massachusetts, nonetheless attrib
Acknowledging issues within the Massachusetts election, Pamela Wilmot, the manager director of Widespread Trigger Massachusetts, nonetheless attributed the excessive major turnout to the state’s shift towards voting by mail.
“In comparison with the issues we’ve seen in different states, it actually was a comparatively smaller proportion of the voters that confronted these points,” she mentioned, including that Massachusetts had benefited from a decline in coronavirus an infection charges. Partly because of this, she mentioned, “we didn’t expertise a ballot employee scarcity.”
Among the many issues that surfaced, some voters in Medford didn’t obtain the right envelopes for returning their mail ballots. “It was an inconvenience,” mentioned one voter, Elizabeth Schwartz, who stored ready for a substitute the city had promised, then lastly went to the polls on Tuesday when it didn’t arrive.
However by and enormous, the state’s historical past of clean elections might have helped keep away from any widespread issues, based on Dr. Stewart, with each voters and election directors excellent at navigating the tedium of voting.
“The political setting may be very noncompetitive,” he mentioned. “It’s not like individuals are ready round to see the ends in elections the place supporters hate one another. This isn’t the high-stakes, high-profile, high-energy, high-vitriol setting that you simply’re seeing in the remainder of the nation.”
Trying on the Massachusetts major is informative, he mentioned, as a result of it reveals what occurs “if a state is simply allowed to run its election and attempt to do the precise issues by way of public administration and by way of being conscious of public opinion. Dr. Stewart added, “There are some hiccups, some delays, each in mailing the ballots and counting. However they’re to this point not tragic, not debilitating within the course of.”
Ms. McReynolds additionally pointed to a web based poll monitoring system that Massachusetts arrange this yr, which allowed voters to trace the standing of their ballots and allowed them to be proactive if any issues arose.