Saugus selectman pleased with success of voter registration drive

SAUGUS – A voter registration drive at the high school Tuesday brought in 78 new voters and made Town Clerk Joanne Rappa very happy.”I thought we might get 25 or 30, but the kids seemed really excited about it,” she said. “I was really very pleased and very impressed they were a great bunch of kids.”The day began with an assembly where Senior Class Advisor Brendan Sullivan spoke to the students on the importance of voting and how the process works.He then handed out voter registration cards and told the kids to stop by the table.While many handed in their cards on the spot, Rappa said students dribbled in all day.Selectman Michael Kelleher also stopped by to see how the registration was going and, like Rappa, was a little surprised by the turnout.”She did a phenomenal job,” he said. “They seemed excited about the process.”Kelleher helped get the kids excited by donating two tickets to the Saturday’s Red Sox game, the start of a four-game series against Texas. Dylan Nichols won the tickets, which were raffled off among those who registered.”They’re great seats too – right on the first base line sitting over the dugout,” he said.Kelleher had a secondary motive to his interest in the registration drive. Last year he made it his personal mission to sign up 1,000 new voters this year and another 1,000 next year. He admits he’s only reached about 50 residents, but hopes to do more.”There’s a lot more I could do,” he said. “I’d like to meet with Joanne about it and see what we can do next.”Rappa and the Board of Registrars undertook the voter registration day as a way to get the word out about voting. Registering 78 new voters also doesn’t hurt the census numbers.Rappa’s office has been working diligently for more than a year to update the census and recently it suffered a bit of a setback.If a resident has missed voting in two federal elections, Rappa can remove their name from the voter registration list and a recent purge of the list set her back 1,500 names.She admitted it was a sort of one step forward, two steps back in her effort to gain census numbers, but quickly added that she was still ahead of the game.”We would have been down to 22,000 or so, but we’re still ahead,” she said.Rappa said she planned to send letters out to the residents she removed from the list and expects a number of them would be back in to re-register.She and the Board of Registrars also decided they were so pleased with Tuesday’s turnout at the high school, they plan to make it an annual event.