To the editor:
Since the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I can’t help thinking that instead of taking steps forward we have stepped back. Every citizen in this country should have the right to vote without being hindered in any way by anyone.
We in Maine are lucky that the laws we have in place give us rights to absentee and mail-in voting. As long as we are U.S. citizens and Maine residents we are allowed to vote. We are lucky to live in rural communities where we know our neighbors and they know us, but this could change here, too. A few decide for the many when the majority should rule.
Right here in the small town of Castle Hill our right to vote in our own town was taken away this year. Many said this couldn’t happen, that you had to vote in your own town or district, and yet it did. Our Select Board of five decided (for the almost 300 voters) that we were no longer allowed to vote in our own town. At the town meeting in March 2021, they said it was “being looked into,” when in fact the paperwork was sent to the Secretary of State for change of venue dated November 2020.
At a public hearing held 10 months later, many questions were asked but not one Select Board member had answers or spoke. In October 2021, several voters at a Select Board meeting offered some suggestions for a solution, including a town-wide vote to see what the majority of voters wanted to do. It all fell on deaf ears, and now Castle Hill voters have to travel to Mapleton to vote at the fire station. A fire station was never meant to be a voting place, but that’s for another time.
Tell Sen. Susan Collins to protect our right to vote and where to vote. In the famous words of Abraham Lincoln, “If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
Sheena McHatten
Castle Hill
