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Board of Registrars
April 15, 2014 Meeting Minutes
- Attendees: Anne Littlefield, Rosemary Fudeman, Claire Golding, and Lynne Grettum
- Meeting was called to order at 9:08AM.
- First order of business was to swear in Anne Littlefield who was re-appointed for a term to end on 3/21/17.
- Minutes from December 19, 2013 were unanimously approved
- Reviewed the 2014 election schedule for both town and state
- Town Election – date May 12, 2014
- Last day to register- April 22, 2014 – registration session will be open until 8PM
- Reviewed Town Caucus nominations – one position, school committee, was inadvertently left out of the caucus nomination process. Information about the open position was advertised in the Landmark and on the Town Website. The nomination process was still open for another week with no one taking out papers.
- Nomination papers were pulled for Selectman and Board of Assessors.
- State Elections – Sept.9th and Nov.4th
- Received only 1 nomination paper to date to certify – Councilor Jennie Caisse
- stLast Day to register to vote in the State Primary on Sep. 9th – August 20, 2014- registration session be open until 8PM
- Review of proposed new vote tabulator – Lynne attended two demos of new vote tabulators to replace the current Optech Eagle we have used since 1996. The new tabulators have not been certified by the state yet, but they are being field tested during town elections in MA. Certification is expected after the results are in when the field tests are complete. Our current tabulator, the Optech Eagle has already started its end of life process. The company, ES&S, wants to retire all the Eagles within the next several years.
- Review of House Bill 3772 – Lynne reviewed the key elements of the bill in addition to early voting
- Online portal for registration status inquiry – Secretary of State’s office already has this up and running.
- Same day voter registration – will not apply to town meetings or changes to party affiliation
- Inactive voters – process goes from yearly to every 2 years. This would impact our current process of calculating the quorum needed to conduct town meetings. Currently we use a percentage of total voters, which includes inactive voters. Every year town clerks try to clean up the inactive voter list by sending out voter confirmation cards (as required by the state), to find out if those who did not respond to the census still live in town. If they respond that they do not they are removed from the voter list. Conducting this survey every two years would leave many voters who no longer live in Princeton on the voter list which in turn impacts the calculation for the town meeting quorum. If this change goes into effect we may need to change the calculation for town meeting quorum.
- 16 year old residents may register to vote – registration would be held until they are 18
- Allowing voters registered in Political Designations to vote in Primaries; currently they can only vote in general elections.
- Audits after biennial state elections that include Governor’s race, Presidential election, of special elections for Congress. These audits would be random.
- There is a task force of Senate and House members, along with City and Town clerks that will report out on April 1st.
- We mailed out 38 letters and had 14 registrations.
- Next mailing planned for early summer
- Meeting was adjourned on a unanimous vote at 10:10AM
Respectfully submitted,
Lynne Grettum, Clerk
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