Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

COMMUNITY COMPASS: Augusta’s 4-ward system follows charter, common sense

Augusta’s City Charter calls for the election of four members to the City Council and school board from each of the city’s four wards and four representatives at-large.

As long as each ward chooses its own representative for council and school board, I believe the city should have four separate polling places.

Voting consolidation removes one of the final vestiges of neighborhood (precinct) gatherings. It takes away the enjoyment of a purely local event, where neighbors rub elbows with neighbors and meet the candidates.

Office-seekers are deprived the opportunity of meeting and greeting their ward’s voters in familiar neighborhood surroundings on Election Day. Instead, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to separate their potential voters from the sea of faces from throughout the city.

I believe consolidation deprives those seeking election from a single ward an important ingredient of the electoral process. The elimination of individual ward polling places with the substitution of the Civic Center for all voting has created an endless line of candidates that form a gauntlet to be run by voters on Election Day.

Furthermore, I find the argument that, “It works just as well in one place” with four of everything, to be questionable. I believe it is confusing for most voters and that the opportunity for mistakes is increased.

For example, after voting at a recent election, my wife and I were directed by an election worker to place our ballots in the Ward 3 voting machine. We live in Ward 4.

The other reason for careful consideration before committing the city to voting consolidation has to do with record-keeping and election statistics.

Those seeking office, their advisers, the press and general public would be deprived of important election result — tabulations — that fall under the public’s right to know and that are used to plan election strategies.

Even now, we no longer know the actual ward-by-ward totals because absentees and the new early voting at City Center are thrown into a citywide count. We get individual ward machine totals, but we do not know the grand totals, including absentees, for each ward.

This is valuable information for the candidates, for the future and for history.

The current method of counting also does not give us information about which wards favored or opposed various referendums because the machine totals and citywide ballots are not counted by ward. Candidates for mayor and at-large council and school board seats also do not receive voting results by ward.

I believe that this discrepancy is a form of neglect to the keeping of historical election records.

Those who work to elect candidates also are deprived of important statistical information.

Therefore, the reasons to consider consolidation carefully include:

• The City Charter does call for the election of four members from individual (separate) wards.

• Limiting ward candidate-specific voter contact opportunity is unfortunate.

• We are not keeping complete, detailed election statistics.

City Clerk Barbara Wardwell said recently, “Most people don’t know what ward or district they are in anyway.”

Exactly! Does anyone think consolidating all voters into one big polling place will help their education on this subject?

One thing is certain: Voters from three of city’s four wards know how far away the Civic Center is from the neighborhoods where they live and — until recently — voted.

I understand the problems finding suitable polling places, but I hope that these obstacles can be overcome in favor of a return to tradition. But, then again, maybe I’m just a sentimentalist.



Don Roberts was an Augusta Councilor at Large from 1990 to 1994 and vice chairman of the Augusta City Charter Commission in 1998 and 2008.