MA Mail-In Voting Increases Turnout To Highest Level In Decades
BOSTON — Communities across Massachusetts are reporting the highest voter turnout in at least a decade in Tuesday's state primary, thanks to expanded mail-in voting approved by the state earlier this year during the height of the coronavirus crisis.
The Massachusetts Secretary of State's office has yet to release a final tally on the number of votes cast Tuesday, but Attorney General Maura Healey tweeted that more than one million people voted in the primary.
"We spend a lot of time talking about the bad news, but let's take a moment to savor the fact that almost 1.4 million people voted in the Massachusetts primary," Healey said. "Early voting and vote-by-mail work."
Earlier this week the Secretary of State's office projected that 1.2 million to 1.3 million votes would be cast. The only other time the number of votes cast in a primary election topped one million was 1990, when there were contested primaries for governor in both the Republican and Democratic parties.
"Voter turnout in the September 1 Primary makes one thing abundantly clear — vote by mail should be here to stay," Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, executive director of MassVote, said in a statement.
The non-partisan, nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation in Massachusetts said the high voter turnout for Tuesday's primary was in large part because the new rules called for sending mail-in ballot applications directly to registered voters.
Gov. Charlie Baker, in his Thursday news conference, said turnout increased also because of incredibly high stakes in contested elections. He said he expects that to happen again in November.
"People believe the stakes in these elections are incredibly high, and people are focused on it and people are paying attention to it and people want to vote,"Baker said.
From Barnstable to Burlington, town clerks had to adapt to the new rules and process the flood of mail-in ballots. In Wilmington, Town Clerk Christine Touma-Conway said mail-in voting increased primary turnout from 4.9 percent in 2016 from 4.9 percent to 37 percent on Tuesday — an increase she jokingly called "traumatizing." She said it did what early voting was supposed to do but hasn't since its implementation in 2016.
"It was worth it because of the increased turnout," Touma-Conway said in an email. "And hopefully having gone through the experience during the primary has taught us some process lessons that will improve our efficiency for November, when we can probably count on at least double the number of mailed ballots and a much higher number of in-person early voting."
Peabody City Clerk Allyson Danforth also said the town experienced some stress from mail-in voting, especially at the end of the night.
"Right up until 8 o'clock we had people running around at the last minute getting the ballots to the polls," she said. "I am sure we were not the only city where that happened. The earlier you can get in mail-in ballots, the better."
There was one problem in Tuesday's primary: In the 4th District Democratic primary, clerks across the district did not complete counting ballots on Election Day there that were returned in the hours before polls closed. That forced Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin to seek a court review of the vote count.
This article originally appeared on the Boston Patch
