To: Board of Aldermen, Mayor Donchess,
My testimony is both to speak AGAINST both the current system for filling vacancies on
the Board of Alderman, Board of Education, Board of Public Works, and Fire
Commissioners and the replacement process proposed in Resolution R-18-073 Amended.
My name is John Lisle, and I have been the Moderator for Ward 8 for the past almost 6 years. I
have served now through three (3) special elections to fill vacancies on the Board of Aldermen
and Board of Education. In my opinion, the process we have now is expensive, marginally
democratic, and wasteful.
Before last year's Special Election to fill a vacancy on the Board of Education I wrote a letter to
the editor of the Nashua Telegraph concerning the expense to the City of having that election. I
also talked to many of the Aldermen and the Mayor about changing the process, but they seemed
to have had no urgency to make a change. However, with the unexpected passing of Brian
McCarthy and the subsequent need for yet another Special Election, the Board seems now to be
willing to consider making a change.
The process Nashua has now is not effective based on three criteria:
First, the mechanism of holding a special election means that the office will not be filled for up
to 5 months. And, if the vacancy occurs 6 months or less from the next election, the office would
go vacant until after the November election.
Second, the city will have to go the serious expense of holding the election. The direct costs
attributed to holding a special election can be as much as $36,000. In addition, there will be
indirect costs in terms of extra work that needs to be done by city employees in the City Clerk's
office, DPW staff, and the School department staff to handle the needs and inconvenience of the
election. And this does not consider the disruption of the lives of the Ward election officials who
will be inconvenienced and may lose pay from their regular work or disrupt personal travel plans
to serve the City.
Third, the elections are always extremely low turnout elections. This is in part due to voter
apathy about municipal elections and the difficulty in today's media environment about
publicizing that the election was happening. Even with the extensive publicity in the Nashua
Telegraph of this month's election and the several candidate forums, the "man of the street"
either did not know the election was taking place or was not interested in participating. These
minimal turnout elections are a poor representation of the will of the City.
Let me share some actual numbers with you.
Ward 8 had an almost embarrassingly predictable 6.4% turnout. With 471 votes cast alongside 6
write-ins, we averaged just over 33 votes per hour. We also registered just 2 new voters during
the day and processed one name change. In the 2018 BOE race, we registered 7 new voters and
the 2015 BOA race we had 464 voters and registered 12 new voters. Ward 8 has the largest
number of registered voters of any Ward in Nashua with over 7400 registered voters.
