There has to be a better way. I was outside my voting location holding a sign for a candidate I was supporting, which is nothing new.

As expected, the three-page ballot led to a very long line of people waiting to vote. There was also a line inside of people after voting waiting to feed their ballot into the machine.

Aside from having faster machines to process the ballots I don’t know what else you can do on that front.

I think, though, there has to be a better way to handle the votes of those who voted prior to Election Day. Nothing new; once again I was getting the final tally at my polling spot.

Usually this is pretty quick but not this time. It was not till 11 p.m. that the tally could be completed. This is not a criticism of the poll workers, they were great.

The delay was primarily due to processing the early voting. After the polls closed, those ballots were now being processed. The stack was placed on a chair and the stack was almost as high as the back of the chair.

I don’t know the procedure for early voting in terms of processing them. It looks like the early ballots are brought by the Election Department to the polling location where the person votes, and then I think the Election Department hopes those ballots can be processed during the course of Election Day.

If that is the procedure, it would not work well when it is a heavy voting location with a multi-page ballot. Are any of the early voting ballots processed by the Election Department?

I know my poling location is not the only one that saw a delay in completing the final tally.

Yes, I think the Election Department can come up with a better early voting processing procedure

Stephen Smith

West Roxbury

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