Printer Friendly Version - Clinton Town Council Ballot Plan Invalidated by State

To illustrate the structure of a Town Council race in which some candidates may be selected for either or both a four-year and a two-year term, this rough draft of ballot listings shows the breakdown of which candidates will appear in each race. This is not a sample ballot nor is it necessarily the official order in which the candidates will be listed.Photo by Eric O’Connell/Harbor News

When Clinton voters trek to the booth on election day, they will see 11 names on the ballot for the seven seats on the Town Council. However, the originally envisioned plan for electing seven candidates under staggered terms failed to meet state standards, so seven of those names will appear twice, and voters may vote for them twice—and the results on election night results may become even more confusing.

When the Charter Revision Commission (CRC) wrote the new town charter that goes into effect this fall, the CRC came up with a unique model for electing town’s inaugural Town Council. Under the intended structure, the seven-member board would have been composed of the four candidates who received the most votes serving a four-year term, and the next three highest vote getters serving a two-year term.

This method was intended to ensure that during each election the entire council would not be voted out and replaced, providing some continuity. The CRC felt it would set the town back to have an entire new council learn the ropes of town governance should all new people be elected.

However, Town Clerk Sharon Uricchio told the Harbor News that structure—which has been previously reported in Harbor News articles and repeated elsewhere—is not going to happen.

According to Uricchio, the Secretary of the State’s Office told the town that the model developed by the CRC is prohibited by state statute. Instead, candidates must be nominated for either a four-year term position, or a two-year term position.

When voters see the ballot, Uricchio said that there will be one section for candidates running for the four-year term, and one section for candidates who are running for the two-year term. There will be seven candidates who appear under both sections. Those candidates are Democrats Christine Goupil, Tim Guerra, and Dara Onofrio; Republicans Chris Aniskovich, Mark Richards, and Dennis Donovan; and Green Party candidate Eric Bergman.

Voters may vote for those particular candidates in either or both the two- and four-year term categories.

If any of those seven candidates win both a four-year term and a two-year term, they will be required to choose on election night which term length they are going to serve.

“The registrar will pull them out of the polling area and [the candidate] will choose which seat they want. They won’t announce the results until we know who wants what seat,” said Uricchio.

While the CRC’s desired model for the council structure was struck down, the commission’s intentions will still be met. Besides 2019, in subsequent elections each candidate elected will serve a four-year term. That means that in future elections, some years will have four council seats up for election, and in other years there will be three. This preserves the CRC’s ideal of preventing the entire council coming up for election at the same time, as is what currently happens in the Board of Selectmen form of government where each candidate is elected to a two-year term.