Taunton, Easton head to the polls Tuesday to pick state rep amid coronavirus precautions
TAUNTON — There will be plenty of hand sanitizer, face masks and paper towels at the city’s polling places for Tuesday’s 3rd Bristol District special election.
Taunton City Clerk Rose Marie Blackwell says she also ordered 3,000 inexpensive pens and 48 Plexiglas sneeze guards for the 11 precincts.
Voters will be able to keep the black ballpoint pens after marking their ballots. Otherwise, Blackwell said, they will be discarded.
Taunton normally has 16 polling places. But the 3rd Bristol District does not include wards and precincts 3B, 4A, 4B, 6A and 6B. The 3rd Bristol also includes Precinct 6 in Easton.
Other measures being taken to minimize any chance of spreading the coronavirus is a limit on the number of registered voters at any given time in a polling place.
Blackwell says no more than four voters will be allowed inside at any given time by each police officer assigned to a polling place’s entrance.
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Democratic candidate Carol Doherty, a retired educator and longtime Taunton School Committee member, is running against Republican candidate Kelly Dooner.
Dooner, 28, is a paralegal who has received the endorsement of fellow Republican Mayor Shaunna O’Connell.
The special election for the 3rd Bristol District state representative seat became necessary after O’Connell in 2019 relinquished her five-term seat as 3rd Bristol state representative in order to run for mayor of Taunton.
She declared her candidacy in August 2019 the day after former mayor Thomas Hoye announced he had accepted an offer to become interim register of Bristol County Probate and Family Court.
O’Connell went on to win a decisive victory over Democratic challenger Estele Borges, who had stepped down as a city councilor to challenge O’Connell.
Blackwell said she expects a low turnout on Tuesday.
For one thing, she said, there’s only one race on the ballot. And secondly there’s the reluctance on the part of some people to vote in person as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Blackwell said the number of absentee ballots as of late Monday morning was close to 1,360.
“It’s huge,” she said, referring to those numbers.
Absentee ballots are either sent in by mail or deposited in a postal box in front of the temporary city hall at 141 Oak St.
Blackwell said most of the absentee ballots have been mailed in and will be accepted until 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The polls are open on Tuesday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Blackwell says there will still be six poll workers per polling place, but she said there will be one instead of two check-in and check-out tables.
She said voting booths will be sanitized after someone has voted by a poll worker designated to handle that task.
Blackwell notes that being a poll worker has traditionally been popular among senior citizens. But this time she said it wasn’t such an easy task filling those slots.
“It was very tough getting poll workers, but I expected it would be this way,” she said.
Blackwell said that some former poll workers had begged off after being advised by doctors and family members that it might pose a health risk.
She gives credit to Superintendent of Schools John Cabral for his assistance in recruiting 16- and 17-year-old students to work at polling places.
Blackwell says it’s not the first time she’s used 16- and 17-year-olds as poll workers. She said state law allows for up to two teenagers of that age to work in each polling place.
The last special election in the city was in 2013 when Ed Markey won the Massachusetts special Senate election by defeating Republican Gabriel Gomez.
Gomez, however, beat Markey in Taunton by 20 votes, Blackwell said.