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CITY HALL
Election Day electioneering
BY ADAM REILLY

Earlier this month, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin sent a letter to Nancy Lo, chair of Boston’s Election Commission. It should trouble anyone concerned with the integrity of Massachusetts politics. Galvin’s letter detailed a multitude of problems witnessed around Boston during the September 23 city-council preliminary election, which debuted new optical-scanning voting machines. The glitches, according to Galvin, were wide-ranging: improper set-up of polling places; poll workers’ failure to provide voters with "security sleeves" that help keep ballots private; and campaign activity less than 150 feet from various polling locations, a threshold mandated by state law. Many of the problems Galvin cited can be linked to an inadequate number of poll workers, a problem Lo and Galvin discussed in a meeting earlier this year. Apparently, their discussion had limited effect: according to Galvin’s October 3 letter, election-night staffing was insufficient at each of the 13 polling locations visited by monitors from his office.

But while Galvin’s missive is interesting in its own right, it also raises an intriguing question: who profited from the chaos that apparently reigned on September 23, and who was hurt? According to Galvin spokesman Brian McNiff, it’s impossible to say. "I don’t think there’s any way of knowing that," McNiff observes.

Mass VOTE’s George Pillsbury disagrees. "The candidate, probably, with the most at stake is Felix Arroyo, because for a lot of his supporters English is not their first language," Pillsbury says. "They’re the ones that sometimes need help with the ballots or the translation." (Arroyo, an incumbent, finished fifth in the at-large preliminary, with just under 13 percent of the vote. The top four vote-getters in the November 4 final election will win council seats.)

"One of the pitfalls of the optical-scanning ballots is that they can be read by poll workers [if security sleeves aren’t provided]," Pillsbury adds. "You have to carry it over to the machine across an open space, and if the poll worker knows the ranking, he or she can read those things even from a distance.... One of the biggest fears of people moving here from other countries it that there’s not going to be a secret ballot, and those people are going to be likely to think about putting Arroyo as one of their four choices."

And the beneficiaries? According to Lydia Lowe of the Chinese Progressive Association, Election Day problems at the Josiah Quincy School — polling place for Ward Three, Precinct Eight — included poll workers (or individuals masquerading as poll workers, Lowe says) forcefully urging elderly Chinese-speaking men and women to cast their votes for candidates numbers six and 10. Candidate number six, at-large challenger Patricia White, finished a strong third with almost 15 percent of the vote. Candidate number 10, council president Michael Flaherty, topped the ticket with a tally of over 18 percent.

The hard sell these voters encountered at Josiah Quincy may have been a statistically insignificant anomaly. Indeed, nothing quite that egregious is mentioned in Galvin’s letter, which says his monitors "witnessed persons holding signs within five feet of the entrance of the polling places at almost every location," and that "[v]oters had to maneuver through an obstacle course of candidates and persons holding signs and campaigning in order to enter their polling place." And Lowe points out that she doesn’t hold White or Flaherty directly responsible for what took place at Josiah Quincy. "I don’t believe they instructed the poll workers to do that," she says. Still, she’s determined to prevent overzealous White and Flaherty backers from reprising these tactics on November 4, and has filed formal complaints with both the Boston Election Commission and the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office. "We heard from more than a dozen people who either had that happen to them, or it happened to somebody that they knew," Lowe says. "We have seen voting irregularities in the past, but I hadn’t seen anything like this for a number of years."


Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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