Westwood Town Clerk and Resident Helpers Process Early Votes in State Election (Updated)

At 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2022, after having started the day around 8:00 a.m., Westwood Town Clerk Dottie Powers and a group of seven long and hard working staff (some volunteering) were still in the lower level meeting room of Westwood Town Hall, processing absentee and early voting ballots cast in the State Election.

Some in this group had arrived a little later in the morning, and an additional two had already left. But by late afternoon, the eight that remained had been working for what constitutes a full day. And the work continued on.

The deadline for early, in-person voting in the State Election had ended at 1:00 p.m. the day prior. The task of the Town Clerk’s Office and dedicated Westwood residents and volunteers on this Saturday was to process the early submitted ballots that were cast either by mail or in-person.

Working steadily away in the room with Ms. Powers were Assistant Town Clerk Brooke Congdon and Administrative Assistant Pam Cumings. They were joined by Westwood resident and volunteer Ernie Greppin, and Westwood residents and election staffers Karen Poreda, Bill Sebet, Mitch Burek, and Kathy McDonough.

Photo by Darlene Wong Cancell. In a lower level meeting room of Westwood's Town Hall,Town Clerk Dottie Powers (right) is aided by resident staffers and a volunteer in preparing early votes for tabulation, come Election Day.

The group were in the midst of processing ballots from Precinct 3. They had completed processing ballots for Precincts 1 and 2. Later, they would turn to the work of processing Precinct 4 and then Precinct 5.

Ms. Powers noted that all ballots contained in their workspace must be processed before the work could stop. She hoped to finish by 7:00 p.m.

“Processing” ballots was the key task of the day – not to be confused with counting votes. (Counting takes place on Tuesday, November 8th at the town’s single Election Day polling location at Westwood High School at 8:00 p.m.)

Ms. Powers explained that the workers in this room were feeding paper ballots into machines – the ImageCast vote tabulator - which registered the marks on each ballot, and stored the votes on a separate memory card for each precinct. The memory cards will be held until Election Day, when they will be transported to Westwood High School. There, after the polling location closes, the ImageCast vote tabulator will print out a paper tape with the early vote tabulation for each precinct. They will be added together with the additional paper tapes produced from votes processed on Election Day.

For hyperlocal news like this, subscribe to Westwood Minute's free, daily newsletter!

But on this Saturday, Ms. Powers and her helpers are concerned with the many ballots currently before them.

“There’s many steps,” Ms. Powers explained, as she described the ongoing work of those around her. “The first step this morning was they had a list they had to check off to make sure that there’s a ballot for each person that had sent it back. So, our numbers have to be spot-on. And then we also have the voter list that we also use on Election Day. So, we check them off on the voter list, now that the voter has voted,” she says. “That was really time consuming,” she adds. “I think that took a couple of hours this morning.”

“And then the envelopes are opened. And they are put in packs of 50 and they are put through the machines. We want to keep a count, because we need to make sure that the number on the machine at the end of this process equals the number of ballots that have been cast. . . . otherwise, we’re going to have to do it again.”

Processing some ballots means hand counting them. Hand counting is required when, for example, some voters make a mistake or don’t color in their choice fully so that the machine will not read their vote.

Photo by Darlene Wong Cancell. Town Clerk Dottie Powers (right) and Assistant Town Clerk Brooke Congdon process two ballots from Precinct 3 that require a hand count. Behind them, an election staffer feeds ballots into the ImageCast vote tabulator.

“So, then it goes to a hand count. All the hand counts we put back here,” she says, tapping a slot at the back of the ImageCast vote tabulator. “They go on a tally sheet, and then I pull this out on Election Night, and we add them, too.”

And more ballots continue to be delivered to the Town Clerk’s Office. These later arriving ballots will be held and transported to the Election Day polling location of Westwood High School’s gym, to be processed on November 8th.

 “It’s been really quite an overwhelming task,” shared Ms. Powers.

While the Town Clerk’s Office has had experience doing advance processing for ballots in past years, what makes this year different is the volume of ballots. Following the new state law that allows not just absentee votes but all Massachusetts residents the option of casting an early vote, Ms. Powers estimates that the volume of early voting ballots that her office handles has increased by 50 percent.

Before the time spent all-day on Saturday processing early votes, Ms. Powers and her helpers had worked on the large task of mailing out over 4,000 ballots to those who requested them by mail.

“We probably still have a couple thousand out there that did not come back,” Ms. Powers commented, noting the unfortunate inefficiency of a lot of work to get those ballots into the hands of voters who may not use them. But those ballots can still be returned to the Town Clerk’s Office or to the Police Station drop box by 8:00 p.m. on November 8th, she says.

“I would just suggest that if people still have ballots that they want to get back to us, to try and get them back here as early as they can on November 8th,” Ms. Powers advises. She notes that it will help the processing be more efficient.

If residents who received mailed ballots from the Town Clerk’s Office do not use them, and the state hasn’t recorded their vote, residents can still vote in-person at Westwood High School on Election Day, says Ms. Powers.

Thanks to Dottie Powers for speaking with Westwood Minute and to Brooke Congdon, Pam Cumings, Ernie Greppin, Karen Poreda, Bill Seebeck, Mitch Burek, and Kathy McDonough for their contribution to this article.

Updated 11/7/2022. A correction has been made the the spelling of a name. "Bill Seebeck" has been corrected to "Bill Sebet." Westwood Minute apologizes for the error.

If this was helpful, subscribe to Westwood Minute's free, daily newsletter!

You may also be interested in reading:

- Early Voting Begins In-Person for November 8th State Election

- Veterans Day Observation (Calendar event)

-Select Board Meeting: July 15th Possibly Last Time Town Government Meets Remotely, Dottie Powers Recognized, Holiday Observances Modified

- Open Enrollment Underway through December 7th for Choosing a Medicare Plan