Regina Todd, a founding member of Devens Connect and longtime community advocate who is leading the effort, walked the Devens Committee through the initiative at its Aug. 5 meeting. She said the idea grew out of conversations in June with two members of the Devens Educational Advisory Committee who were struggling to reach residents, particularly families with children in school. Rather than repeat past door-to-door pushes limited to Devens Connect sign-ups, organizers decided to combine all three registrations into one canvassing effort.
The three are distinct. Devens Connect is a voluntary email list—Todd said subscribers get four to six informational emails a year—with no bearing on any election. Registering with MassDevelopment allows a resident to vote in annual elections for the Devens Committee and the Devens Educational Advisory Committee, regardless of citizenship status. Registering with the town clerk in Ayer, Harvard, or Shirley, whichever historically holds the parcel where a resident lives, is required to vote in municipal, state, and federal elections and does require citizenship. That registration also matters closer to home: Massachusetts requires you to be a registered voter to vote at a town meeting, so Devens residents would need to be registered with their historical town to have a say when the next super town meeting is called, likely next spring to consider rezoning Vicksburg Square, as the Press reported last week.
Todd presented voter statistics that she gathered in July to illustrate the work to be done. Devens Connect had 118 households signed up, which she put at 65% of Devens households. MassDevelopment’s voter rolls had 168 registered voters. Combined town voter rolls showed 537 registered voters with Devens addresses spread across Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley. At Shirley Meadows, the senior living facility in Shirley, at least one resident in 48 of 58 apartments was registered to vote. A sign-up table at a neighborhood barbecue hosted by MassDevelopment staff the night before the Aug. 5 meeting added nine MassDevelopment registrations, six Devens Connect sign-ups, and one new voter registering for the first time, Todd said.
The volunteers assisting Todd completed a training session July 30 and are distributing registration forms for all three lists this summer, with a first phase focused on Devens proper wrapping up by the end of September. A second phase this fall will extend outreach to Shirley Meadows and the Shriver Job Corps campus, which Todd said already has 128 residents registered to vote in Ayer. The fall effort will also seek to sign up residents in transitional and veterans’ housing, whose populations, Todd said, turn over often enough to need a second pass closer to Election Day. Tolga Calgar, an elected member of the Devens Committee, is among the volunteers separately reaching out to immigrant neighbors to explain registration options without asking about their citizenship status directly.
Devens Committee Chair Laura Scott said turnout wasn’t really the point. “Yes, we want to get out the vote. That’s important, but actually, our primary focus is not that,” Scott told the committee and meeting attendees. “Our primary focus is creating a community here on Devens, or doing our best to do that. So that’s our goal. Whether we achieve it or not, we’ll see. But that’s really what we’re trying to do here.”
State Sen. Jamie Eldridge, who took the floor for a question-and-answer session immediately after Todd’s presentation, offered his own one-word review: “Impressive.”
