Vineyard election officials are expecting a record turnout for Tuesday’s election following a rush of new voter registrations and a huge number of absentee ballots already cast.
The number of absentee ballots as of yesterday was in some cases close to twice that normally seen at a presidential election, a sure sign, Island town clerks said, of an engaged electorate, and a likely indicator of an unprecedented turnout.
In the face of complaints that it would inconvenience large numbers of customers and potentially damage business, Steamship Authority management will abandon a plan to reduce summer ferry service out of Oak Bluffs.
The plan, which would have cut two inbound and two outbound sailings from Oak Bluffs and run them instead to and from Vineyard Haven, would have reduced costs by allowing the Oak Bluffs terminal to close earlier.
J.M. Barrie, the author who gave us Peter Pan, that fictional boy who never aged, knew there was one way in which we all never grow older. “God gave us memories that we might have roses in December,” he wrote.
And at the Tisbury Senior Center last Sunday, the roses of memory were in full bloom. Susan Klein’s memoirists were giving readings of their work.
Introducing last night’s debate between the four candidates competing to take the state house seat being vacated after 20 years by Eric Turkington, host Judy Crawford noted the absence of a Republican candidate as a complicating factor.
The choice would have been much easier, said the president of the League of Women Voters of Martha’s Vineyard, if the contest was simply between a Republican and a Democrat. But the presence of three independents made the whole thing far more complex.
A sophisticated phone fraud scheme which targeted large numbers of Vineyard residents last week, seeking access to their bank details, appears to have fooled very few people and netted little for the perpetrators, Island banks reported this week.
The phone calls, which began on Thursday night, purported to be from local banks, informing customers their bank cards had been suspended. The computer-generated voice on the line asked them to press one to be transferred to the security department, so the card could be re-activated.
The same state agency which has backed the controversial Cape Wind development could allow similar projects even closer to the Vineyard under the new Oceans Act, Cape and Islands Rep. Eric T. Turkington said this week.
The new law, signed by Gov. Deval Patrick in May, lifts the previous blanket ban on alternative energy proposals in state waters, opening up the prospect of wind or other energy projects within three miles the Island.
