Letter: Let's Make Sure Every Stoneham Voter Is Heard

STONEHAM, MA — The following letter to the editor was submitted by Stoneham School Committee member Thomas Dalton.

This August marks 101 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of sex. It will also mark the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a powerful and wide-ranging federal law which dismantled racist obstacles to the franchise for millions of Black Americans. As American citizens, our right to vote ought to be considered paramount, and access to the ballot box should be simple, safe and universal.

There are many lessons Stoneham needs to learn from our unusual municipal election on June 27. For obvious reasons, this election was postponed and adjusted as part of the Town’s COVID-19 response, but the remarkably low turnout— only 880 voters, or about 5% of the registered voters in town— make it clear that Stoneham officials need to do much more to encourage and facilitate voting in the upcoming elections on September 1 and November 3.

The State Legislature has made it possible to vote three different ways in these upcoming fall elections: a mail-in ballot, an early ballot completed in-person in the two weeks before the election, or in-person on Election Day. In order to ensure that everyone feels safe and well informed when it comes to casting their vote, I call on the Town Clerk, Stoneham’s top elected elections official, to take the following steps:

1. Contact every registered voter by mail with information about their voting options
2. Publish similar information in local newspapers, on the town website, and on commonly used social media platforms
3. Share election information with local businesses and community organizations
4. Ensure that early voting is available outside of normal business hours to improve access for working voters

Our right to vote is too important for the Town to stand by and fail to implement common-sense measures to improve voter turnout. Stoneham needs to pull out all the stops to make sure that all voters are heard this fall.

Thomas Dalton, member of the Stoneham School Committee
4 Winthrop Street

This letter represents my personal opinion as an individual and not the viewpoint of Stoneham Public Schools or the Stoneham School Committee.