With warm weather and clear skies, Brookline voters headed to the polls Tuesday to cast their votes on Election Day.
As of Friday, more than 10,000 Brookline voters had already cast a ballot in the 2026 midterms, according to Town Clerk Ben Kaufman. 2,784 of those came during in-person early voting, and an additional 7,786 sent in their ballots by mail, Kaufman said.
Those votes already cast make up 24% of Brookline’s 43,739 registered voters.
About 4,000 more residents had voted in-person on Tuesday as of 3 p.m., according to Kaufman. With few contested positions on the Brookline ballot, voters who spoke to Brookline.News at polling places mainly expressed interest in statewide issues and the nine ballot questions.
Laura Baltzell, 65, who has lived in Brookline since 1992, voted at Brookline High School and then walked her dog outside of Brookline Town Hall, proudly displaying her “I Voted” sticker.
“Vote blue baby!” she said to another voter leaving the polls.
Baltzell said she came out to vote as part of her civic duty and desire to continue living in a blue state.
“Republican politics are abhorrent to me right now,” Baltzell said. “It feels good to be part of the community and making choices that are hopefully good for not just me but other people.”
She admitted she hasn’t always voted in midterms but felt it was important to cast her vote during midterm elections due to national issues.
Chris Kallaher, 66, has lived in Brookline since 2007. This year the nine statewide ballot questions got most of his attention due to their focus on local issues.
He had known about Questions 8 and 9, but said he needed to learn about the remaining questions prior to casting his vote.
Kallaher voted for Democrats in the statewide races.
“Considering how things are going to go here, it was almost symbolic,” Kallaher said. “But I did want to show my support.”
Linda Southworth, 72, brought two mail-in ballots to Town Hall, hers and her daughter’s, with her 8-year-old grandson, Theo, tagging along.
Asked what made her feel she had to vote, she said, “Everything. I’m really discouraged about the way our politics are going.”
She was focused mostly on the state and federal races. Southworth also wanted to make sure the right representatives get elected to enforce certain ballot issues.
“I think locally we’ve got more support here than we do in a lot of places,” she said.
Southworth thought the ballot was simple and easy to follow.
“It’s pretty clear. It’s not brain surgery,” she said.
In recent years, she’s been concerned with apathy among young voters, particularly millennials.
Southworth said her daughter told her that all candidates on the ballot were the same, which she disagreed with.
“I don’t know how we can get these disaffected millennials to vote, because I think they’re feeling like it doesn’t matter, and to me that’s crazy,” she said.
She has voted since she turned 18. For her generation, she said, voting at 18 felt unequivocal because “that’s when women got the right to vote.”
Harrison Leigh, 25, of Brookline, said he came to the polls because of his faith in the democratic process.
Two ballot questions in particular brought him out. One was Question 5, the measure “rearranging state funding” by changing the state’s revenue cap and requiring rebates.
The other was Question 3, which would end separate party primaries and put all candidates on one primary ballot, with the top two vote-getters moving on to November.
“I just want to make sure those laws did not pass or change,” Leigh said.
He said he wasn’t paying close attention to the governor’s or Senate race as Massachusetts has historically stayed Democratic.
Samantha Laboy, 37 said she was thinking about voting rights across the country and her luck of being a Massachusetts resident when marking her ballot.
“I think that given how many people are being stripped of their voting rights around the country, it would be really silly for me, who has access to my voting rights, to not vote,” she said.
The main issue on her mind was ensuring the state still has a Democratic governor.
Laboy also voted to keep recreational marijuana legal due to the local tax revenue from cannabis sales.
“Our town benefits a lot from the revenue that comes from it, and it would be really silly to lose that revenue in a town that needs it so much,” Laboy said.
Rachel Wolf and James Donner, both 35 left the polls comparing their “I Voted” stickers, which were designed by local kids. Voters were able to pick a sticker design after they voted.
They said the ballot questions were the main reason they came out.
For Wolf, the most important one was Question 8, which would repeal the legal recreational marijuana sales voters approved in 2016.
“I just wanted to make sure that was protected for folks that use it,” Wolf said.
Tom Ricke, 57, said he believes it’s an American citizen’s duty to vote.
Ricke said the ballot questions took the most thought and research to make a decision.
“I think you have to read between the lines in all the ballot questions. It’s not so straightforward as you might think,” Ricke said.
He called Tuesday’s midterm election “very critical.”
“No matter what kind of party or affiliation you might have, this is really one for the ages,” Ricke said. “It’s almost as important as a presidential general election.