Easy Voting

Easy Voting – Gardner MA

The City of Gardner Massachusetts has accomplished successes in making it Easy to Vote for its citizens, including, but not limited to:

While other cities around the country have had voting problems, the City of Gardner Massachusetts is a model of success in this area. GardnerMagazine.com spoke with Gardner Mayor Michael Nicholson about Gardner’s secret to success:

Mayor Nicholson: And I think this goes back to what we talked about earlier, Werner, where it’s getting the communication out there from the start. If people have questions on, you know, I want to be able to early vote, I want to be able to mail and vote.I want to know how to do this, how to do that. Where is my polling location. What times are the polls open on Election Day. We’re always going to issue that information upfront from the start. The new Votes Act has made it so that we are required to do mail in balloting for all local elections. The only difference between local elections and state and federal elections right now is that we aren’t required to do in-person early voting. So answering those questions on especially where we may have a special state primary election or a special state Senate election this year, with the recent resignation of Senator Ann Goby. Finding out now that we have a state election and a local election, what process needs to be done, what way and when will those elections. And we know the municipal election will take place the first Tuesday of November. We don’t know when the states special election will take place yet. But when we find out, well get that information out as early as possible. And when you do that, people have an understanding of what to do. And that’s the best thing we can do

Part of Gardner’s uniquely successful formula is doing much more than the law requires so that citizens have every opportunity to vote. It is something the Mayor takes quite seriously. Here’s what he had to say;

Mayor Nicholson: So by state law, we are required to have a polling location either in every ward or in a ward adjacent to it. So the most Gardner could go down to is 2. Because of the 5 wards that we have. You can say that there are words and precincts adjacent to each other in at least 2 of those locations. But what we’ve done is we’ve made it so that every ward in the city has their own locations, so that people don’t have to travel far for one. And like you said, we want people to vote. If people are going out to vote on their lunch break, they’re not going to spend their entire time waiting in line and still not be able to eat. And if that’s if they get to the ballot box within the time they have for their lunch break. If people want to vote, they should be able to vote. And we should make it its easy because were American. And that’s the thing is that’s the tenets that our whole country was built off of.As people having a say in how the government runs, and who their elected leaders are. And they shouldn’t have any roadblocks in the way of doing that. So that’s always going to be a priority that we have.

Even with these extra efforts, the cost of each election in the City of Gardner, Massachusetts is less than $1 per citizen. Some would say it is a very good investment in democracy. Here’s what Mayor Michael Nicholson had to say.

Mayor Nicholson: We spend about $15000 per election we have here. If its a state election, will actually get reimbursed that funding from the state. If its a local election, that’s borne by the city. It adds a couple of personnel here and there to be our wardens, our clerks and our different poll workers that are there and the officers who do the details at each location. But it’s worth every penny. And just to make sure that people have that right that’s guaranteed here in the United States, just to go out and vote. It makes things easier for people to do it. It gets makes the elections more efficient and easier to run. Because when you have a smaller ballot count per polling location, there’s less of a margin for error that comes there. Because rather than having all 5 locations in one. And having to deal with all of that with one set of staff, you have a larger staff counting a smaller portion of the overall amount of balance that are turned in. So it really makes it more accurate and effective in your practices that are there. So it really does help in the long term.

When it was suggested that perhaps some of Gardner’s policies would be adopted on a national level, here’s what the Mayor said:

Mayor Nicholson: Lets hope. Lets hope. Gardner is always willing to be the trendsetter.