Beacon Hill Voters Will be Heading to the Polls Next Tuesday

By John Lynds

Beacon Hill residents will head to the polls on Tuesday, November 3 in what city officials are saying will be a quiet election.

With no mayoral race this year, only five candidates vying for one of the four At-Large seats, and Beacon Hill’s incumbent City Councilors running unopposed, voter turnout here is expected to be light come next Tuesday.

Aside from the At-Large race where candidate Annissa Essaibi-George will try to unseat one of the four incumbents there is only two Boston City Councilors with challengers and those are in Districts 3, 4, 5 and 7. Beacon Hill’s elected City Councilors Bill Linehan and Josh Zakim are running unopposed Tuesday.

Only 59 precincts voted during the September 8 Primary Election and only 5,553 votes cast in the District 4 and 7 races.

There was no primary for the At-Large race because there were fewer than nine candidates. Usually nine or more At-Large candidates would trigger a primary and the top eight vote getters would advance to the General Election. This year there are only five candidates, Essaibi-George and At-Large Councilors Stephen Murphy, Michael Flaherty, Michelle Wu and Ayanna Pressley and all automatically advanced to the General Election.

With only 7 percent of the total registered voters voting on September 8, it is hard to gauge how much voter turnout would increase with the At-Large General Election added. While the number is sure to rise with the addition of the citywide race, some city election officials think it will not be by much.

The final numbers are not yet in on the total voters registered in Boston but that number is expected to be around 380,000. Of that number only 13 to 20 percent are expected to vote.

City election officials said it has been quiet this election season with very few calls to the department for information.

The voting districts on Beacon Hill are Districts 1, Ward 3, Precincts 5 and 6, and District 8, Ward 5, Precincts 3, 4, 5 and 11. Voter registration is located at the nearby Boston City Hall.

Voting location in Beacon Hill are the Amy Lowell House, 65 Martha Road, City Hall, 1 City Hall Plaza, State House in the Great Hall, Second Floor, West End Library, 151 Cambridge St., and Hill House Community Center, 127 Mount Vernon St.

The polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on election day.

All precincts will have English/Spanish ballots, and English/Chinese and English/Vietnamese ballots will be available in precincts where the population requires them, according to city officials. Interpreters will be available to assist voters in Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects), Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean, and Russian as well as other languages.

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