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To the editor:
Three cheers for Marblehead democracy, which achieved a satisfactory outcome Tuesday without the help of this local voter.
Registering for a mail-in ballot was the easy bit. Knowing I was going to be in Scotland on June 9, I strolled into the Town Clerk’s Office a week or so before leaving and signed the absentee voter form.
It takes time to print ballot papers, and the law of the Commonwealth is that a mail-in ballot must be mailed out by the Town Clerk to an address, so I chose a reliable Marblehead friend to whom I am enduringly grateful.
Sure enough, the packet arrived with her on Tuesday, May 19, a few days after we had left Marblehead for Europe, but we had a cunning plan and there was time in hand to have it all DHL’d to my attorney’s office in Perth, Scotland, where it duly arrived on Wednesday, May 27.
Here it waited patiently for me until I pitched up from Greece on Monday, June 1. There is a point to all this. I got straight to work at a table in a local cafe (seen here with pen in hand) and set about trying to get it back to the Town Clerk in Marblehead ASAP.
Perth, Scotland, is a fair-sized town just over twice the size of Marblehead. Yet it lacks anything like our UPS Store. We did find a mom-and-pop store which is a dropoff for FedEx, but when asked if he could take a FedEx consignment the proprietor laughed gently and suggested that it would be “much more reliable” to take it to the local post office. “Things go missing here all the time,” he added encouragingly.
This was done and the ballot sent international mail, to be signed for on delivery with end-to-end tracking. It would be with the Town Clerk, the postal clerk told us, in five-seven “working days.”
Counting on fingers ensued and we calculated that from Monday, June 1, it would make it by June 8 or 9 — election day itself.
For a mail-in ballot to be accepted, it must be received by 5 p.m. on election day.
Well, it was not. And as of this writing, Thursday, June 11, it still has not. I tracked the package and all was joy with the British Post Office, from pickup in Perth at 2:20 p.m. June 1 to receipt at the International Customs Bureau of the United States Postal Service in Jamaica, New York, at 6:37 a.m. on Friday, June 5.
Pretty slippy of Britain’s Royal Mail, eh? Not so good on the United States Postal Service International Customs end.
It’s an envelope addressed to the Town Clerk in Marblehead. Inside is a second envelope. Containing a ballot. And it’s still there. Having a lovely time in Jamaica, New York.
All right. We should have reached out to a reliable courier service, which somehow could have located us somewhere in Scotland. We did locate the DHL depot in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town, but after knocking at the locked door the man there refused to take it. “We only do parcels here,” he said with a satisfied smile. At least he didn’t call me “mate.”
Then there is the trifling matter of expense. To DHL for courier delivery to Perth, Scotland (including a $24 fuel surcharge): $86. To send it internationally end-to-end tracked, etc., from Perth to the United States Postal Service Customs desk in Jamaica, New York, where it remains indefinitely: about $15.
Yes, I know, I’m still Scottish and if you take care of the poonds the pennies will take care of themselves. But what price democracy? About $101. And it didn’t work
Rhod Sharp
Franklin Street
