Sigh, as I feared when family members returned from early voting in Boston, all those ballots will be treated as absentee ones come Tuesday. That is, they will arrive in masses of envelopes inside larger envelopes for the wardens and clerks to process.

Our training for the recent primary included a promise that Elections would be able to process voters from the 255 precincts via smart computer tech. That would have meant fewer ballots for each precinct to handle. But no... Read more.

The Ward 19 Democratic Committee will meet Monday, January 6, at 7:00 PM at the Roslindale Community Center. The Committee welcomes any voters registered as Democrats in Ward 19 who are interested in participating in Committee events, and contributing to our mission, to attend our meetings. At this meeting, we will be preparing for our February caucus.

To find out if you live in Ward 19, check your address here.

Finally, the return of the campaign song.

In less melodic news, Rob Consalvo throws his support behind rubber baby buggy bumpers, um, rubber sidewalks.

Common Cause Massachusetts is hosting a Redistricting Olympics this summer. We will be taking citizen drawn Congressional, State House, and State Senate maps all summer, evaluating them, declaring a winner, giving out prizes and submitting the winning maps to the MA Legislative Redistricting Committee for consideration.

The purpose of the redistricting Olympics is threefold: to educate the public about the steps in the redistricting process, to initiate public participation in the political arena, and to pressure the legislature to draw the districts so that the citizens are appropriately represented.

Data files, computer files for printing ballots are public records and can be requested from the Elections Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, email election at sec.state.ma.us

Images of the ballots can be problematical where the content would have to be transcribed letter by letter, key by key or optical scanner.