The following letter to the editor was submitted by Andover resident Steve Walther, a local government activist. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Andover News. You can learn more about our policy on opinion and commentary on our Mission and Policies page.
Article 21 degrades local democracy, to maintain your voting rights, vote no!
In an era of federal executive edicts – local democracy is more precious than ever. Article 21 imposes an onerous burden for citizens to access local democracy for issues that impact our Town and neighborhoods. It also fails to facilitate access as it does not update the antique paper signature requirement (try getting legible signatures these days!) with a more realistic approach.
It proposes a requirement to gather the signatures of more than 5% of registered voters (>1300), by paper petition, to initiate a session of our Town legislature (Special Town Meeting). Note that this is a >6X increase over the current requirement of 200 signatures, and is far in excess of the average number of voters who actually vote on warrant articles at annual Town Meeting! The average from 2021 to 2024 is <400 votes on an article, or <1.5% of the 26000 eligible Andover voters, data source: official Town Meeting transcripts.
Requiring so many more voter signatures to call a meeting, than typically vote at such a meeting, violates the spirit of local democracy envisioned in the Town Meeting format. This Article 21 attack on democracy is positioned deep (2nd night or later) into a long Town Meeting when very few people still attend – many of those who remain do so because they are associated with our Town’s executive branch. This subversion is effectively another executive edict, now restricting access to local democracy.
Even the Town recognizes that Special Town Meetings are crucial and worth the money, as they called three of their own in 2018 and piggybacked the Town’s own hugely important articles on Andover High School – new building vs. renovation in the November 2023 Special Town Meeting called by citizen petition. In an era where the Andover budget is over 250 million, where we have the cash for granite curbs for parking lots, cushy Town office renovations, and decorative yellow cows, claiming citizen initiated democracy is too expensive for Andover is appalling.
When democracy is under threat at the federal level, we need to keep every scrap of local democracy we can. Article 21 restricts voter access to local democracy. Vote no on Article 21, maintain your increasingly precious voting rights.
Steve Walther
Andover
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