Franklin MAtters Weekly: election

Showing posts with label election. Show all posts

Monday, November 12, 2012

Next up: high school project status

Franklin voted on Tuesday, Nov 6th at the high school field house. 17,500 voters came out to cast their ballots an impressive turnout! While the parking lot may have been hectic, there were minimal to no lines inside as things moved smoothly. Debbie Pellegri, the Town Clerk, reported that the machine for Precinct 7 was sticking on some votes but other than that, no issues.

The results were already report here and here so we won't spend more time on those now. I updated the chart to depict the voter turnout for the elections from 2003 through to the most recent Nov 2012 results.

One of the minor complications to the parking lot situation on Tuesday was that the contractor closed off the second entrance to the parking lot during the day. I had parked at Horace Mann/Oak St and walked over to save time going through the parking lot. As I came back in the evening to get the results, I noticed that the entrance had been fenced off.

Awareness of the high school building project schedule is on tap for this week. Wednesday at 7:00 PM in the Council Chambers, the project status and construction phases will be reviewed. Building Committee Chair Tom Mercer has stated that the project manager, the contractor, the architect and the Building Committee will be present for this meeting.

Tuesday evening, you can take in the hunger experience at Dean College. Additional details ate found here
http://www.franklinmatters.org/2012/11/dean-college-hunger-awareness-banquet.html

Thursday evening, the Downtown Partnership is holding a networking event at the Six One Seven Studios. They are located at 25 Kenwood Circle. If you have not been to view their production studios, this is a good time to do that and network with other business folks in Franklin at the same time.

Other items posted in the past week include:

Nov 11

Nov 10

Nov 9

Nov 8

Nov 7

Nov 6

Nov 5

Sunday, November 4, 2012

It's time to vote - Nov 6th

Last week the summary was all about preparations for Hurricane Sandy. Franklin was spared considering how hard the folks in NY, NJ and other central Atlantic states fared Granted nationalGrid still needs to improve on how they provide support during the storm and immediate response, but this is nothing like the recovery that will take weeks in sections of NY and NJ.

As one who lived in NJ and worked in NYC for some period of time, to see the devastation there is heart rending.

I do want to shift gears to focus on the election Nov 6th. You are likely as sick as I am of the bombardment of robocalls and incessant ads that this campaign season has brought to us. The point of it all is that we do have choices to make on Tuesday, November 6th. To help summarize the information available to us on the candidates and their positions, I have the following to offer:

Voting for all of Franklin is at Franklin High School.

View Larger Map

The polls will open at 6:00 AM and close at 8:00 PM.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Reflections on the primary election results - Sep 6

Yes, I'll admit to taking the summer of for this weekly recap. With school back in session, the primary election behind us, Franklin business is beginning to get 'busy' again. This is not to say nothing was done during the summer months, no not at all! Just a recognition that the volume of traffic (i.e your interest) had declined significantly as you went about your summer.

So with the primary election results at top of mind, let's review some thoughts from the election.

I have grouped the election results by type:
Local = the biannual election for the Franklin government (light blue)
Override = includes both the operational overrides and the high school debt exclusion (light pink)
Presidential = the major election every four years
State = just the MA elections including the special election to fulfill the Kennedy seat (light yellow)

Brown vs. Warren
One could argue that the recent primary is more of a 'local' than state election and the results certainly do fit more inline with recent Franklin local elections. Given the separation of ballots (Democratic, Republican, and Green Rainbow), it really does belong in the state category. Had either Warren or Brown be contested within their party, the overall results might have been different. This campaign is already getting considerable media coverage and campaign ads have been frequent from both sides. How much of an effect did it have on this election? I would say very little given the no-contest races for both candidates.

Looking at the results for both Warren and Brown, Brown might be quite happy with what he sees. A great percent of the Republicans who came out to vote actually cast their vote for him (96%) than those on the Democratic side cast their vote for Warren (76%).

10th Norfolk District
For the 'real' local portion of the election, the 10th Norfolk seat being vacated by the retirement of Jim Vallee, the two sets of primary results are interesting. On the Democratic side, Jeff Roy took 1610 of Franklin votes with Peter Padula taking 1220. Another 39 Democrats left their ballot blank (could not decide?) and another 3 Democratic voters wrote in for another person. At the Nov 2011 election, Jeff Roy gathered over 2400 votes for his Town Council campaign. With a good vote turnout likely coming this November with the Presidential election and all the campaign ads to remind folks to vote, this could be a good sign for Jeff.

On the Republican side, Stolle Singleton took 688 votes to Richard Eustis 684 and John Jewell took 488. There were 79 blanks (Republicans who couldn't decide?) and another 14 voters who cast their ballot for a write in candidate. Unfortunately for Ms Singleton, her four vote margin was not enough to cover for the votes that the Medway voters cast in Mr Eustis home town and she finished second overall. How the Republicans may vote in November will be interesting to see. Mr Eustis is going to need to do much better in Franklin to take the head to head race against Mr Roy.

Note: the Medway totals and overall election totals can be found here:
http://www.boston.com/news/special/politics/2012/state-primary/house-10th-norfolk.html

Waiting for the results
Waiting for the results on election night requires patience. The Town Clerk and her team have a set process to go through to ensure accurate and fair results for the voters and candidates. For those who came out to vote, you know that the small gym (instead of the field house) was the site of the election this time. Given the warm and humid weather, it made for a warm day for all the election workers. Fortunately, the custodial staff managed to round up a number of fans from elsewhere int he high school to make the conditions tolerable!

Counting the votes is a careful process. The check in lists and the check out lists for each precinct need to be tallied to see that they agree. This confirms that the right number of voters who came into Precinct 1 (for example) actually checked out with the Precinct 1 tally and then cast their ballot in the Precinct 1 box. The box runs an electronic total reading the ballot. This total is taken and input into a spreadsheet for the official vote count. Each question or candidate gets their totals by precinct entered in by one person while one reads the total and other observes the process. This helps to avoid transposition errors in the manual entry. This entire process is done separately for each ballot and in this case you had three ballots: Democratic, Republican and Green Rainbow.

Once the totals are entered and tallied and validated, they can be printed and shared with those waiting. Among the waiting are the candidates, family members, supporters, party representatives and members of the media. The small portable printer took quite some time to print the spreadsheets. Could the Town Clerk use another printer? Yes, they could also arrange for technical support and have that individual connect the Clerk's laptop to one of the high schools printers and get a better and quicker output.

The results from the MA State Primary election on Sep 6 can be found here
http://www.franklinmatters.org/2012/09/franklin-ma-state-primary-results.html

The spreadsheet with the summary of election results by Franklin precinct that drove the chart (above) can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkwjbnXDBhczdFU5alN5a21UYTY2LXQzcHp6akt0OFE

Please note that the November 2011 registrations by precinct were copied for both the March high school vote and the recent state primary. Once I get a full precinct total from our Town Clerk, I'll make the updates. Given that the total registered voters is just over 20,000. The percentages will not vary enough to change the thoughts.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

FM #75 - Charter Changes - Vote Nov 2

Let's take a few minutes to prepare for the election, Tuesday, Nov 2, 2010. There are five ballot questions for Franklin voters, 3 are statewide questions and two unique to Franklin.

Time: 11 minutes, 55 seconds

MP3 File

Session Notes:

Let's take a few minutes to prepare for November 2, election day here in Franklin, across MA and the US.

The leadership positions of the commonwealth of MA are open, some are contested campaigns some are not. I won't spend any more time on reiterating who is running for what. By now, you have probably been inundated with campaign messages, phone calls, signs in public places, etc.

Amongst the five ballot questions Franklin voters will see on Tuesday are three for the commonwealth and two specifically and uniquely Franklin's.

These two questions are the end step in the process that began a few years ago with the Charter Committee co-chaired by Paul Cheli and Larry Benedetto . The proposed charter changes have been covered extensively here in the past year as the committee made their presentation to the Town Council in July of 2009, the Council formed a special subcommittee and their presentations and discussions lead to the vote in April where the changes were approved by a 6-2 vote. Zollo and Jones voted against, Vallee was absent for the vote.
http://franklinmattersweekly.blogspot.com/2010/04/fm-64-week-ending-41110.html

The changes went to the Legislature and received final approval with Gov Patrick's signature in September to put the question on the ballot for us to have our say this Tuesday.
http://franklinmatters.blogspot.com/2010/09/charter-changes-approved-by-governor.html

There are two questions – the first basically cleans up some technical language. The second approves the change of the Treasurer/Collector from an elected position to an appointed position.

I won't spend time reviewing the arguments for an against. I will include the clip from the Town Council meeting Oct 20th when Cheli and Benedetto took a few minutes during the citizens comments to speak on the changes. You can listen to there comments here:

(inserted clip)

They were followed by Jim Dacey, the current Treasurer/Collector who spoke for the charter change and in his words answered some of the questions around the change. Jim summarizes it very well:

(inserted clip)

The posting with the ballot questions, candidates and positions to be filled is attached and will be re-posted on Tuesday.
http://franklinmatters.blogspot.com/2010/10/franklin-ma-election-nov-2-franklin.html
http://franklinmatters.blogspot.com/2010/10/franklin-ma-election-nov-2-franklin_22.html

I encourage everyone to get out and exercise your civic duty to cast an informed ballot. If there is a question that you think I might be able to answer, please feel free to reach out and ask me.

I will do what I can to help.

As I close this session this week, let me remind you that

If you like what I am doing here, please tell your friends and neighbors
If you don’t like something, please tell me

The music for the intro and exit was provided by Michael Clark and the group "East of Shirley". The piece is titled "Ernesto, manana" c. Michael Clark and Tintype Tunes, 2008 and used with their permission

I hope you enjoy!

Note: email subscribers will need to click through to Franklin Matters to listen to the audio podcast.

Franklin, MA