The Associated Press makes the calls about election winners and losers, and last Friday they made the call that Massachusetts voters shot down Question 7, rejecting a proposal to ease housing costs by allowing smaller lot sizes.
The measure lost by just over one percentage point, splitting voters down the middle with high density urban areas overwhelmingly backing it, and many suburban communities rejecting it.
State House News Service reporter Sam Drysdale explains why the issue was so personal for voters on both sides, beyond where people live.
Sam Drysdale, SHNS: I think housing is one of those issues where people come at it from very different life experiences. If you're a young person trying to stay in Amherst or a family looking for an affordable home for the first time, you see the housing shortage every day. But if you're in a small town in the hilltowns, then you might worry about losing local control over development.
There's a real distinction between Greater Boston and Western Massachusetts and how this vote went, which I think reflects larger differences and ideas about how the state housing crisis affects people, and question seven didn't actually apply to many rural properties because they rely on wells and septic systems. The question only would have allowed rezoning on sewer systems.
I think the close vote reflects a genuine statewide housing crisis, but also very different ideas about how to solve it.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Supporters had hoped a decisive win for Question 7 would send a message to state lawmakers who are working on some big housing policy changes. What do you think lawmakers will take from this very close vote?
Voters recognize that we have a housing crisis, but they're not necessarily giving Beacon Hill a blank check to solve it any way that it wants, since it was a 50-50 split.
That should tell lawmakers that they should be thoughtful.
We need more housing, including starter homes and smaller homes, but we also need to listen to municipalities and the voters who don't want that. The challenge is finding a statewide solution that respects those differences.
One less controversial matter on the ballot was same day registration and voting. Now, voters can already register and vote on Election Day in all of the other New England states. And Massachusetts voters approved it here last week. How does that work elsewhere?
This is not a new or experimental idea. Like you said, in other New England states they actually have other forms of election day registration.
The basic concept is pretty straightforward. If you're eligible to vote but you miss the registration deadline, you can go to your polling place and you can establish your identity and residency register and cast your ballot all on the same day. It can be especially helpful for young voters, renters, or people who recently moved, and political scientists think that in Massachusetts specifically, it could increase turnout by 3 to 7 percentage points, which is a meaningful amount.
As for logistics of same day registration, I'm thinking of older municipal buildings and some of the remote polling sites in Berkshire and Franklin counties, where connectivity can be spotty. How will election clerks ensure every polling location has secure real time access to a state database to prevent double voting. Is double voting a danger?
This is one of the biggest practical questions, particularly in Western Massachusetts. We have to be careful to not design an election system around the assumption that every polling place has reliable broadband.
Rep David Vieira, who is from Falmouth, another rural area on Cape Cod, raised this concern during a hearing on this issue in the spring, pointing out that some communities don't have reliable cell service, so the state will need to have a secure backup system, clear procedures for verifying registrations, a new system to prevent duplicate voting and procedures around that and funding to make sure that every community can participate.
However, Secretary of State William Galvin's office, who has championed this, has said that they feel confident that they can pull this off.
Speaking of Galvin's office, I'm looking forward to the release of the official results of the election later this month. I think we'll find the ballot roll-off is pretty interesting. (That's when the voter casts a vote for the top ticket races, but then leaves the lower profile contests or ballot measures blank, or even ignores the whole second page.) Since there were so many ballot questions this year, do you think they are indicating fatigue if they blinked the whole second page, and is there anything else that you think will learn from the official election results?
So far, it's looking like without the certified votes, we're not seeing a lot of fatigue. In fact, Question 9 the last ballot question, the the gun ballot question, had the most voters on that one.
I'm particularly interested in what happens next with Question 1.
The public records measure [it] passed with more than 85% of the vote. That's an extraordinary mandate from Massachusetts voters.
But already Legislative leaders are suggesting that they might pursue their own narrower version of the law, which would continue a recent trend we've seen with lawmakers seeing ballot questions not as a law that the voters have passed, but kind of a starting point for them to make their own tweaks to.
