Last week, a staff member at the Town Clerk’s Office told the Current there would be no in-person early voting for the June 9 election — the vote that will ask Marblehead homeowners to decide on a three-tiered Proposition 2 1/2 tax override that could reach $15 million. The apparent decision came without consulting the Board of Registrars.
It’s worth noting that last year’s referendum, solely on the MBTA Communities Law question, included early voting. Yet this year, with a major override and a full election on the line, there has been no comparable push for that same access.
As of this writing, a final decision had not been made — which is itself a problem. Voters deserve certainty, not ambiguity, about how they can participate in one of the most consequential local elections in years.
The online pushback that followed was revealing. Some of the opposition to early voting tracked a familiar national script — the idea that expanding access to the ballot somehow threatens the integrity of the result. The only people voting are your neighbors. Marblehead is not at risk of being overrun by outside interests. The question on June 9 is what this community wants for itself. Making it harder to vote isn’t a principled position — it’s a preference for a smaller electorate.
It has been a revealing few weeks for civic life in Marblehead.
The week before, Marblehead resident David Modica stood up at Town Meeting and asked — in language that was anything but accidental — whether the town’s new housing plan was designed to go nowhere. Millions of people have now watched the clip. His cheeky question has traveled from Marblehead to Australia.
What resonated wasn’t naivety. It was the rare sight of someone in a public meeting saying exactly what so many others in the room were carefully not saying. The “confusion” in the room wasn’t shared — Modica wasn’t confused at all. He was asking the folks in the room — officials and residents alike — to admit what they knew.
His question landed because it named something real. The situation had been built over years of Town Meeting votes, referendums and legal pressure, accumulated through a long, bruising fight that had divided neighbors, dominated town politics and consumed enormous energy — arriving at what felt like a limp conclusion. The town had voted to overturn a prior housing plan. The years of procedural complexity had produced exactly the outcome Modica was making sure no one could ignore.
What made the moment viral wasn’t the plural noun he chose, or even his willingness to say it. It was the recognition — shared by people in the room and across the country — that someone said the quiet part out loud. The fight was ending, and only cynicism and sarcasm could claim victory.
Marblehead has more big decisions coming, and coming quickly — competitive races for multiple offices and a generational vote on tax rates that will shape town services for years to come. The debates, the history, the outcomes, the aftermath all need to be documented, preserved and scrutinized. That’s what a paper of record is for. And that’s what we are. We’re here to make sure these decisions — big and small — don’t go unnoticed.
We covered Town Meeting from the morning’s last-minute developments through the final gavel — video interviews from outside the high school and from inside the gym, live updates, real-time photos and a vote tracker residents could follow minute by minute.
We built a Town Meeting Guide that translated every warrant article into plain English, and this year we included an online tax impact calculator so homeowners could see exactly what was at stake before casting their vote.
When we learned early voting for the next election might not happen, we asked why and reported back when the story changed. Our letters and opinion pages have been the venue where virtually every major civic debate in Marblehead since 2022 has played out in print. And between issues, our free weekly newsletter and active social media community keep thousands of residents connected to the stories that matter.
Across the country, local newsrooms have disappeared — bought up, gutted or shuttered. Marblehead is fortunate to have one that answers only to its residents. The Current was founded to fill a void left when a national media chain gutted the Marblehead Reporter. It was built by journalists and community leaders who believed this town deserved a paper of record — and who built one from scratch.
More than 150 print editions and 5,500 stories later, it’s still here. That foundation has since attracted partnerships with institutions like Endicott College and Boston University’s Local Journalism Initiative, whose students have produced investigative work published in the Current.
The Current delivers 10,000 copies weekly to every home and business in town, free of charge. We publish voter guides and The Headlight, the Marblehead High School student newspaper. We run an internship program that places MHS seniors in our newsroom — covering public meetings, interviewing officials, learning what local journalism looks like from the inside. More than one of those students has left for college to pursue journalism. We don’t just cover Marblehead — we invest in its future.
Marblehead residents take pride in their institutions — the library, the school system, the Festival of Arts. The Marblehead Current is one of those institutions — an independent, nonprofit paper built by this community, for this community. We’re proud of what we’ve built. We hope you are too.
Our annual spring campaign is underway. If you believe Marblehead is better when its residents are informed, we hope you’ll support the Current.
