In town and city halls across Massachusetts this summer, workers are racing to send out vote-by-mail ballots for the Sept. 3 primary.
Just a few years ago, sending thousands of ballots to voters would have been unimaginable for election workers, but now election season means all hands on deck, especially during a presidential year.
“Election Day is now not just Election Day, it’s sort of every day,” said MaryEllen Marshall, town clerk in Winchester.
Since the state began no-excuse mail-in voting in 2020, the nature of elections has changed significantly. And while the changes have made voting more accessible and convenient, they have placed a burden on the public employees responsible for running elections, leaving many feeling overwhelmed.
Early in-person voting and automatic voter registration have also tested election workers, expanding their duties with little additional support.
“Our team doesn’t increase because vote-by-mail became law,” said Dracut Town Clerk Jayne Boissonneault, who said her office relies heavily on volunteers, many of whom are municipal workers. “If they can be here, they’ll be here. If they can come tomorrow, they’ll come. If they can’t, they won’t, you know. We just try.”
Last month, Boissonneault turned the Board of Selectmen’s chamber into an assembly line to prepare more than 4,000 primary ballot kits. She said she and the two other employees in the clerk’s office often work overtime on nights and weekends to make sure elections run smoothly, which is just one aspect of their jobs. Like election workers in many communities, the trio is also responsible for vital records, licensing, public records requests, and other essential business in a town of about 32,000.
All told, the demands have become “impossible,” Boissonneault said.
Before mail-in voting was widely available, about 300 people requested absentee ballots in Dracut, Boissonneault said. For the general election, she expects more than 60 percent of her town’s 24,000 registered voters will vote by mail.
In Winchester, Marshall and her team of three full-time staffers and two poll workers have sent 3,500 primary ballots out so far and expect to send out at least 500 more before Sept. 3. They “pretty much put everything else on hold when it’s election time,” she said.
“It’s totally a different way of approaching the customer service to the voter,” Marshall said about mail-in voting. “You do have to think about it in a different way.”
Voting at the polls typically only takes a few minutes, whereas voting by mail requires several steps, each of which takes time and careful attention.
“It has shifted the work over a longer period of time, and it starts earlier,” said Debra O’Malley, director of communications for the secretary of state’s office. “It is more work because before the voters were doing a lot of footwork themselves. They were doing the work of coming to the polling place and getting their ballot, and now the clerks are having to stuff envelopes.”
The pandemic popularized mail-in voting, with nearly 42 percent of Massachusetts voters casting their ballot by mail in the 2020 general election and another 23 percent voting early in person. In 2022, the state Legislature passed the VOTES Act, which made mail-in and early voting permanent.
For each primary and general election, the secretary of state’s office must now send a vote-by-mail application to all registered voters who have not already enrolled. Voters can return their ballot by mail, put it in a ballot drop box, or deliver it to their local election office.
Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, which advocates for more accessible voting, said mail-in voting brings “democracy home to the kitchen counter” instead of forcing voters to find the time on Election Day.
“It’s really a big win for voters and a win for our democracy,” he said. The group is advocating for need-based grants for local election offices for more staffing and resources to handle the heavier workloads, he said.
“Implementing any new reform is going to take time, and it requires resources, training, and support,” said Foster, who anticipates that mail-in voting will become more popular over time. The state Legislature increased funding for early and mail-in voting from $6 million to $8 million for the current fiscal year, he said.
Election officials are finding creative ways to make sure voters receive their ballots as soon as they can. In Barnstable, Town Clerk Ann Quirk organizes the ballots by ZIP code and mails them from their corresponding post office so they aren’t sent to a processing center in Rhode Island. Most voters get their ballots within two days, she said.
That is made possible, in part, because the town hired 30 poll workers to work at a satellite location to prepare mail-in ballots.
“I had to do this because my office is busy all day long,” Quirk, whose office is also responsible for providing vital records for Cape Cod Hospital, said.
Other clerks, such as Kaitlin Wright in Haverhill, have asked for more employees to handle the increased workload.
Haverhill Mayor Melinda Barrett had seen the demands of the new system when she volunteered to prepare mail-in ballots as a city councilor. Barrett believes mail-in voting is an important step in expanding access to voting and made it a priority to add another employee in the clerk’s office, the only new position in the city’s budget for this fiscal year, she said.
“The demands of the election cycle have really taken a toll, I think, not only in our clerk’s office but around the state,” she said. “You see a lot of city and town clerks retired in the last few years because they didn’t want to work through another presidential election cycle.”
Many towns cannot afford the broader responsibilities without more state assistance, election officials said.
“[The Legislature] must fund it,” Marshall said. “They can’t do an unfunded mandate, because that’s where you have inequity, and that’s disenfranchisement in the long run.”
Currently, communities must pay for certain election costs upfront and apply to the state for reimbursement. O’Malley acknowledged that system creates uncertainty for election officials, whose communities must foot the bill if a request is denied. She said the lack of upfront funding from the state Legislature for election equipment and staffing was “unfortunate,” but that local officials should “recognize that they need more help in their clerk’s offices, given the fact that the job isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago.”
Election officials also raised concerns about the demands of early in-person voting, which begins Aug. 24 and requires that election officials work on Saturday, when town and city halls are typically closed.
With the November election in just 12 weeks, election officials said they expect to transition straight from the primary to a grueling stretch of mailing out ballots and preparing for the state election.
“I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like,” Quirk said. “By November, I’ll have to have a long nap, I think.”
Jacqueline Munis can be reached at jacqueline.munis@globe.com. Follow her @MunisJacqueline.