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Keeping the Island Safe for Democracy (and Paperwork)

by Eva Murray

By the time you read this the primary and referendum election on June 12 will be over, and the list of candidates securing their party’s thumbs-up to run for governor, county sheriff, hog reeve, fence viewer, etc. should be more or less in order. That is, if the ranked-choice voting process, this state’s Very Large Experiment, works as it should. But as I write, the election is still ahead of us, and we who serve as municipal clerks in these tiny places are busy doing our bit for democracy. Envelopes from the office of the Secretary of State, specifically the Bureau of Corporations, Elections and Commissions, filled with instructions and checklists and forms to sign and return, land on my kitchen table every few days. The amount of paperwork required at Matinicus Isle Plantation City Hall has grown exponentially over the past decade and tiny, remote towns are not exempted. The days of “Oh, we can ignore that procedural requirement, because nobody knows we’re here” are over.

Those of us who work the polls take some pride in doing it right. Doing it right means no, you cannot register your sternman—he has to register himself, he’s not a puppy—and no, we cannot close the polls early and go home. Every year somebody seriously asks, “You mean you really have to sit here all day until 8 o’clock at night? That’s awful! I should think they’d let you just have everybody come vote in the morning and get it done and go home. What’s that place in New Hampshire where they all vote early and close up? There can’t be that many voters on this island, so can’t you do that on Matinicus?”

No, no, and no. First, you’re thinking about Dixville Notch, NH, where they have a local tradition of everybody—they have a population of, like, twelve—gathering at midnight to get the whole thing done by zero dark thirty just because that’s a thing over there, at least for major elections. We have no particular desire to be up at that hour, or to steal their thunder; it is their famous custom, after all.

It wouldn’t work here anyway. There is a myth that you either live on the island and never leave or you are merely a tourist. Actually, we see very few of either type. Most who call this place home are year-round-part-timers, including fishermen who work this bottom but rarely stand on dry land here, building trades guys who take mainland work in the winter, and folks who own property here and show up for Town Meeting but who aren’t around that much because their livelihood is not lobstering. The probability of every registered voter being physically present on the island on the same day is absolutely zero. People come and go all the time. We have no way of knowing if some voter might want to cast a ballot at 7:55 pm.

Also, being an election worker here isn’t awful. When I first got involved in elections back twenty-some-odd years ago, my kids were very little, and a day “stuck” at the polls was a day off from changing diapers. My good husband was on the team and he brought us ballot clerks a casserole or a crockpot at suppertime and kept the littles entertained while mom did her civic duty. With so few voters—maybe 75, plus or minus, since we got most of the dead people off the list—there is never a crush of people at the polls unless a half dozen show up at the same time for coffee break and hang around gabbing while they eat their doughnuts. We might politely remind the chatterboxes to keep it down when somebody is trying to read the incomprehensibly convoluted verbiage that is typical of a referendum question with its inexcusable frequency of multiple double-negatives. And, we make sure there are no crowds around the antique wooden ballot box, because that’s the law, and of course we are all about following the law.

Officially, a voter is expected to state their name audibly to the poll worker, and to provide identification. One thing that is unusual about election day here is the infrequency of an unfamiliar face, but that new sternman does have the right to register and vote here (he or she will typically be indignant when asked for a photo ID, but them’s the breaks, and no, the captain cannot “just vouch for them.”) I recall one year we had a new ballot clerk, a woman who had not lived on the island full-time for that long, and she was embarrassed to admit that she did not know everybody and had to ask some voters for their name. I reassured her that her inquiries were the closest thing to proper procedure we’d seen in years.

There are no long lines at the polling place, where work-weary citizens must decide whether to stand in the rain all evening or quit and go home to supper. There is no confusion about which ward one is registered at, and no starch from the ballot clerks unless you are drunk and disorderly or have in mind to hog all the doughnuts.

Anyway, the town clerk and registrar (that’s me this year), and the two other ballot clerks, do not actually have a lot to do until count-up time, and even then, it’s more about keeping track of all the various forms and proper documentation. Counting ballots in a town where 50 voters is a bang-up turnout is not an onerous job. Still, this is no time to get sloppy. This is American democracy in action. Our election procedures are above reproach. I did leave my post for an hour once years ago when a guy got a nail in his hand because I am also an EMT. I think the statute of limitations has run out on that dereliction of clerical duty.

Between voters we do our hobbies and our paperwork and we visit. We do not hover over iPhones and similar devices, by the way, largely because they don’t work particularly well. We spin, and I don’t just mean we tell stories: several of us haul our spinning wheels into the town office. Spinning wool at the polls has become sort of a tradition. I have some white handspun yarn I have made over half a dozen elections now, almost enough for a sweater. Sometimes people bring projects from home they need to finish: they sort photos or write thank-you notes or do homework. These days, the ballot clerks are apt to be knitting socks most of the day.

We eat the healthy lunches that we have brought from home, our apples and our salads, but mostly we eat doughnuts.

There is a prevailing myth—and I still hear people off-island who really wouldn’t know state this as fact—that Matinicus is a staunchly Republican enclave. Actually, our voters are fairly evenly split between Republican, Democratic, and Unenrolled voters, and have been for at least 25 years. There are even a couple of Green Independents who may or may not even remember that they registered that way. We are not staunchly anything. We are not unified.

In most places, as I understand it—maybe everywhere except here—voters are also asked to officially rubberstamp their local school budget, after said budget has already been properly voted in at a school budget meeting. That second vote on the same item, albeit without context, is where people who didn’t go to any school meetings, didn’t read any articles about the school funding situation in their area, and in a few cases have the idea that the free lunch kids are being served surf-and-turf with truffle oil have the opportunity to vote that budget under the bus, which certainly tosses a wrench into the gears, which may be the intention. Matinicus (MSAD 65) decided a while back to dispense with that second vote, which saves us a lot of explaining. According to our superintendent this district is unique, or at least gosh-darned unusual, in that.

There are no signs in the traffic islands and highway medians, nor are there traffic islands or highway medians, and candidates do not often come here to campaign. I do recall somebody running for sheriff once making a visit. They probably figured they knew most of us already anyway. We would welcome candidates for sheriff here in future given sufficient advance notification, considerable prior public advertisement in large print, pan-pan announcements over the VHF—you know, routine advance planning like that, with time to scare up some matching license plates.

Have I mentioned that we have doughnuts?