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election

    CIVICS

    Farmer Elected to Select Board

    By

    TRURO — “Farmer Stephanie” Rein is the newest select board member after a spirited race against planning board member Karen Tosh to succeed the late Maureen Burgess.

    Tuesday’s special election brought out 33 percent of the town’s 1,877 registered voters. Rein won 378 to 240; there were two blanks. She has said she’ll run for a three-year term on May 12.

    Rein, 50, will change the balance of the board on several key issues, such as housing diversity and the future of the Walsh property, 70 acres of town-owned land, said Nick Brown, a Rein supporter.

    “I’m amazed that 620 people voted; the last time we had a special election we had 84 voters back in 2004,” Rein said. “I’m so proud that people in my community were so engaged.”

    Rein has said she wants to help working-class people and families because they are not well represented on town boards. She has stressed the need for affordable housing and housing for the elderly who want to downsize and stay in Truro.

    CIVICS

    Town Election: Tosh to Seek Burgess’s Seat on Truro Board

    Special election for select board called for Feb. 18.

    By

    Karen Tosh photo
    Karen Tosh and one of her many beloved pets. (Photo K.C. Myers)

    TRURO — The select board has set Feb. 18 as the date for a special election to fill the seat left open by the death of Maureen Burgess. At least two people are considering a run.

    Karen Tosh, 69, an attorney specializing in family law and a member of the planning board since 2017, has announced her candidacy. Stephanie Rein, 49, a member of the High Dune Craft Cooperative, which has a host community agreement to grow marijuana in Truro, also plans to run. The town clerk confirmed on Tuesday, at the Independent’s deadline, that Rein had taken out nomination papers.

    This story focuses on Tosh’s candidacy. Follow-up reporting on Rein and any others who may come forward will be in subsequent editions.

    The deadline to return nomination papers is Dec. 31. The winner of this election will serve for just 84 days before having to run again in the May 12 town election, when Burgess’s term would have expired.

    Last week the Truro Select Board voted unanimously to hold a special election despite some debate about whether it be worth the $1,200 to $1,800 expense. Though she changed her mind, Chair Jan Worthington initially said she wanted to keep a four-member board until May 12.

    “I think we’re working well together,” Worthington said.

    She added that holding an election would be a distraction, given several large issues confronting the select board. These include deciding what to do with the 70-acre Walsh property, overseeing the proposed 40-unit housing development known as the Cloverleaf, reviewing the annual budget, and hiring a new town manager, since Rae Ann Palmer has announced she is leaving in June 2020.

    At the same time, the select board had just listened to a presentation by the town’s dept. of public works director, Jarrod Cabral, who is proposing a new building next to the fire and police facility on Route 6. Cabral hopes for debt exclusion votes allocating $1.8 million for design at the spring 2020 town meeting and ballot.

    The estimated cost of the new building is $20 million.

    In arguing for a special election, board member Bob Weinstein said a two-thirds vote (known as a “supermajority”) will be needed for the board to hire a new town manager. Furthermore, he said, having just four members will mean more decisions are likely to be put off because of tie votes.

    “I wouldn’t want anything to be set aside if we didn’t have unanimity,” he said.

    Board members debated the long learning curve to become an effective board member. They agreed 84 days isn’t enough time to learn the job fully. But as Kristen Reed, a board member, said, the 84 days provided “a good running start.”

    She said there is a good chance the person who runs in February will compete for a three-year term in May.

    “I cannot imagine someone getting in and getting voted out 12 weeks later,” said Chris Lucy from the audience. “It just gets someone on the board a little earlier.”

    Indeed, Tosh said she would run again in May for a full three-year term, in an interview Monday at her home on Cooper Road, which overlooks the paddock of her four rescue miniature horses. Though she and her husband, Tracey Maclin, have owned their Truro home for 21 years, she moved here full-time five years ago. That’s when she and Maclin, a law professor at Boston University, founded the nonprofit Auction Rescues Inc. to help save horses from slaughter.

    Tosh practiced family law in Kentucky and Boston for 30 years and now does mediation on Cape Cod.

    She enters the select board race at a time when the planning board she now sits on has been criticized for its negative stances on affordable housing and other development. The select board, for example, recently refused to authorize town counsel to defend the planning board when an applicant went to court over conditions placed on the accessory dwelling unit he wanted to build for an employee. The planning board lost that case.

    Tosh said the planning board members work very hard and without consistent professional help. Truro has had seven town planners in three years, Tosh said.

    She frequently disagrees with the majority’s opinions, she said, and is often an outlier on that board. If she is elected to the select board, Tosh would need to resign her planning board position.

    Tosh told the Independent that one of her goals has been to make the approval process for building projects “less painful” for applicants, by which she means quicker and with better regulatory board coordination.

    Tosh said she supports the Cloverleaf project, but thinks it is unfortunate that those with concerns about it are automatically branded as anti−affordable housing.

    “I have skills that are useful,” Tosh said, “and I want to use them where the center of the action is, and that’s the select board, the executive branch of town government.”

    Tosh is also on the board of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and is a trustee of the Truro Conservation Trust.

    ELECTIONS

    Wellfleet Scraps Wooden Ballot Box

    Questions about election security are dismissed by select board

    By

    WELLFLEET — The select board voted 3-2 on Oct. 22 to “retire the horse and buggy,” as board member Kathleen Bacon put it, and replace the town’s 95-year-old hand-crank ballot box made of wood with a $5,200 optical scanning machine to count votes.ballot box

    Interim Town Clerk Jennifer Congel requested the change in an Oct. 18 memo, writing that the electronic scanner would be more accurate and secure than the old method and that parts and service for the old ballot box, built in 1926, “are getting few and far between. What would happen if we did have a malfunction of the box during a primary or general election?”

    Congel appeared before the select board with Joel Bergeron, general manager of LHS Associates of Salem, N.H., the company that sells and services the ImageCast tabulator, manufactured by Dominion Voting of Canada. The machine, Bergeron explained, comes with a two-year warranty. He also said that 250 towns in Massachusetts were using it.

    “Are these hack-proof from a foreign power?” asked board member Justina Carlson, adding, “That was a joke.”

    Bergeron laughed and said, “There’s no internet connectivity. They are completely stand-alone units.”

    The New York Times Magazine reported last year, however, that electronic voting machines can be compromised even if not connected to the internet. “Many voting machines that elections officials insist are disconnected from the internet — and therefore beyond the reach of hackers — are in fact accessible by way of the modems they use to transmit vote totals on election night,” wrote reporter Kim Zetter. “Add to this the fact that states don’t conduct robust postelection audits — a manual comparison of paper ballots to digital tallies is the best method we have to detect when something has gone wrong in an election — and there’s a good chance we simply won’t know if someone has altered the digital votes in the next election.”

    Irene Daitch raised the issue of security in questioning the select board’s direction.

    “I’m astounded to hear about this since there’s such a cry abroad in our country for paper ballots,” said Daitch.

    “We won’t lose paper ballots,” replied Congel. “The paper ballot will be fed into a machine and the machine will tally the votes.”

    “And people will be tabbing to see if the paper ballots agree with the new machine?” asked Daitch.

    “No,” said Bergeron. “Instead of dropping them into a box you will be sliding them into the machine that will count the votes at that time. At the end of the night the machine will print out a results tape.”

    Congel also argued the electronic machine was necessary because human vote counters were unreliable late at night. The tabulator, she wrote in her memo, has a nearly 100 percent accuracy rate. “You can’t say that about humans at three o’clock in the morning,” she said.

    Select Board Chair Janet Reinhart also claimed that “it was 3 a.m for the last presidential election. There’s going to be some point where people aren’t going to want to do that.”

    Neither Reinhart nor Congel was present at the vote counting in Wellfleet after the polls closed on Election Day in 2016. Five different people who were there had a different recollection of the timing that night.

    “No way was it 3 a.m.,” said Dick Elkin. “I’d say it was more like 11 p.m.”

    Selectman Michael DeVasto, along with Helen Miranda Wilson, voted against purchasing the new tabulator.

    “Maybe I’m just nostalgic,” DeVasto said. “We’ve had a machine that has operated for 100 years and is still not obsolete. It doesn’t need much servicing. This machine is [gauranteed] for two years. In five years maybe this is obsolete. I just think it’s unnecessary and I feel like there’s very few pieces of the town and parts of the election process that are still unfettered. I love to feed that old machine my ballot.”

    “I understand nostalgia,” said Carlson, “but we owe it to our hard-working volunteers and staff to catch up with the times.” She suggested that those who felt nostalgic about the old box could have it displayed in a historic exhibit. “The people doing the labor have asked for an improvement. It would be inconsiderate to not grant it. Our job is to recognize the workers.”

    Daitch was not persuaded. “Your referring to nostalgia and change being difficult for certain groups of people is rather condescending,” she said. “I’d be very proud to have this community stand up and say we’re going to use paper ballots.”

    Congel noted that Wellfleet was one of only three towns on Cape Cod still using the old-fashioned ballot box. The other two are Truro and Provincetown.

    Cynthia Slade, Truro’s town clerk, said Tuesday that she was not aware of any discussion in that town about switching to an electronic vote tabulator. “Personally, I don’t think we’re at that point,” she said.

    Susan Joseph, Slade’s assistant, agreed that there was no desire to scrap the old box. “People kind of like it, to be honest with you,” she said.

    Provincetown Town Clerk Darlene Van Alstyne also said on Tuesday that there had been no talk there of changing the voting ritual.

    “It’s quite a well-loved tradition in town, the hand counting,” she said. “The volunteers come in, we have pizza, and we have a great time.”

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