Ballot questions in Boston’s
inner city

Vidya Rao

Beginning at 6:00 p.m. on election night, 26 precincts in Roxbury, Hyde Park and Mattapan reportedly ran out of ballots.

“We have been receiving reports from folks throughout the urban districts that there are no ballots,” said Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree. “We’re getting a sense of deja vu from the national election, but this is not in Florida or Ohio, this is in Massachusetts.”

Ogletree, state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and Charles Walker Jr., executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, spent the evening calling Secretary of State William Galvin to question how this could happen. Their efforts did not yield results.

“We were treated with nonchalance and simply told that the state police were delivering ballots to some areas,” Ogletree said.

The Secretary of State’s office conceded that several precincts had run low on ballots, but stated that reports of exactly how many precincts were affected was “exaggerated.”

“A number of precincts ran low. The city has been taking ballots to those precincts by police cruiser,” Brian McNiff, spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, told the Boston Globe.

By 8 p.m., those ballots had not been delivered to Ward 12, Precinct 2 at Boston Latin Academy or some of the other polls. According to Walker, ballots at Boston Latin were exhausted at 6:30 p.m. and by the time polls closed, no ballots had been delivered. Walker, who was present at the poll, reported that over 100 people left frustrated after waiting more than two hours with no ballots.

“This is a disgrace to allow a multitude of precincts to run out of ballots,” said Walker. “The Mayor’s Office told us before the election that there was no need to have attorneys at the polls, that this would be an error-free election.”

As it turns out, this election seems to have been anything but error-free, particularly for voters of color.

Iris Martinez was lucky. She only waited half an hour at the Brookside Community Health Center while Election Department workers scrambled to bring ballots. Others who came to vote left in the hour it took the city workers to bring ballots to the polling station.

“I was surprised,” Martinez said. “I’ve never had a problem voting before. I’ve voted every year since I was 18.”

Many voters whose polling location ran out of ballots were sent to other locations to vote. When they arrived at these other locations, they were told that they too had run out of ballots. Earlier in the day at the Hyde Park Municipal Building, the electronic ballots malfunctioned and Ogletree and Walker remained at the location until they were repaired.

“This is as bad as the worst Jim Crow segregation of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s,” said Ogletree. “We have to fight through the night because tomorrow is too late to fix this.”

With the most diverse and heavily African American district in the state, Wilkerson was outraged that a number of precincts in her district ran out of ballots.

“What has happened is reprehensible,” she said. “It’s not rocket science — all election officials needed to do was look at the voting rolls and provide enough ballots to each location for the correct number of registered voters. There seems to be evidence of conscious design.”

It could, however, also be evidence of an incredible upsurge of voter turnout in communities of color, for which election officials were unprepared.

Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein, who ran a losing campaign to unseat William Galvin, said that the secretary of state should have anticipated a higher turnout, particularly in communities where support for Deval Patrick is strong.

“This is not an innocent shortage of ballots,” she said. ”This is a mind-boggling failure to predict the turnout.”

Stein noted that Galvin did not release an estimate of the turnout for this year’s election.

Stein also pointed out that the city is now under a consent decree for voting rights violations against people of color.

“Incredibly, this falls into the pattern where voting needs of communities of color were not anticipated and voters were turned away from the polls,” she said. “This is like Florida.”

Wilkerson, Ogletree, Walker and others were trying to get the polls in these locations to stay open until 11 p.m. to at least attempt to remedy the hours voters lost waiting for ballots, but were unsuccessful.

“Deval Patrick can win by 30 points, but if urban voters are not counted, it is a violation,” said Ogletree. “In 2008 we need to have lawyers ready to defend voter rights because we can’t count on the system to protect them.”

Yawu Miller contributed to this report.