By BILL CHAISSON
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CLAREMONT — Voting for Wards 1 and 2 takes place in Ward 1 at the middle school on South Street. They divide the gymnasium in two with rows of voting booths facing one another and put up some bollards, ribbon and signs to guide voters through the process. The ward clerks oversee this process in a city the size of Claremont; in the smaller municipalities of New Hampshire, the town clerk would have a lot of responsibility held by the ward clerk.
David Roark is the clerk for Ward 1 in Claremont. His duties start well before election day. As soon as the sample ballots are available he must post them in two public places. Roark has been clerk for 10 or 12 years now and his modus operandi is to find a downtown business person who is willing to post the ballot in their store window and he laminates another copy of the ballot and posts in a stake in his front yard.
At the poll site itself on Election Day, the ward clerk is essentially a manager and works in tandem with the moderator. Janice Fletcher, the Ward 1 moderator, stands by the “ballot box” and accepts each voters sheet of paper filled with blacked in circles. In a larger community like Claremont, these are fed directly into a scanner. In a smaller town, like Unity, up the hill from Claremont, they still use a wooden box. Roark said that Ward 1 in Claremont was still using a wooden box when he began serving as clerk.
The ballots in unity are neatly folded when they are handed out, like a brochure or a road map. Once in the privacy of a booth, the voter unfolds it, marks it up, and then refolds it for insertion into the slot on top of the box, which is staffed by poll workers.
The location of poll site is in part determined by accessibility. The entrance to the historic Unity Town Hall — site of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s show of unity in 2008 — has been modified to include an ADA-compliant ramp. There were ADA-compliant voting booths in both sites visited by the Eagle Times.
New Hampshire voters must produce a photo identification to poll workers who are making sure that they are on rolls. This often takes the form of a driver’s license. It does not have to be a New Hampshire driver’s license, but the poll worker must note the type of identification if it is from out of state.
The Granite State is one of the few that allows voters to register right up to and including Election Day. In both Unity and Ward I in Claremont there was a table staffed with three to four poll workers, who registering people to vote on the spot. As New Hampshire is one of a minority of state that did not adopt the “motor voter” scheme (any time you conduct any business with a state office, you are given the opportunity to register to vote), it is kept compensating policies in places to encourage registration.
Roark said that he and Fletcher are authorized to make judgements if someone shows up to the poll without an identification. Fletcher had been in her position for 16 years when Roark arrived, and her husband is a former fire chief; she is well connected and rooted in the community. If she or Roark know the ID-less person well, they are permitted to vote.
At about 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning the polls had been open for about three hours at the middle school and Roark said that there had been a relatively heavy turnout for a mid-term election. There were not long lines at the voting booths, but there were intervals during which all of them were filled and people did have to wait before filling in their ballots.
Although it begins between 6 and 10 a.m., depending on the polling place, voting ends — all across New Hampshire — at 7 p.m. Although he carries out his duties as a volunteer leading up to Election Day, Roark is a paid employee on the day of voting, and he will be putting in a full day; he must oversee the counting of the votes after the polls close.
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