More than 350 students, faculty, and staff at the Bromfield School voted in a mock election last Friday, expressing their preferences in the presidential race and also on four ballot questions. That number represents less than half the 796 students and adults who make up the Bromfield community.
At the top of the ticket, Democrat Hillary Clinton won with 60 percent of the ballots cast, Republican Donald Trump received 22 percent of the votes, while Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party took 9.3 percent, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein trailed with 4.2 percent.
Jonathan Gall (left) checks in at the mock election as students from the current events class work the desk. Seated, from left: Jamie Barrett, Sam Hays, Isabelle Quinn, and Ross McMahon. (Courtesy photo)
Clinton did less well among Bromfield voters than she did in Harvard’s later official election, which she won with 66 percent of the vote. Trump did nearly the same in both the mock and the official elections. But third-party candidates Johnson and Stein won twice as high a share of the Bromfield votes as they did of town votes on Nov. 8.
Despite the nation’s focus on the presidential campaign, 18 Bromfield voters, or 5 percent, left their ballots blank in the presidential contest—though whether out of indecision or as a protest against both candidates is impossible to say.
By contrast, nearly every voter took a stand on the four ballot questions. Bromfield voters strongly rejected an additional slots parlor in Massachusetts, with 72 percent voting against Question 1. They also voted down a proposal to raise the cap on charter schools (Question 2), defeating it by almost a two-to-one margin, 62.5 percent to 37.5 percent.
To judge by these results, the issue that Bromfield voters felt most strongly about was Question 3, the regulation of animal confinement on farms. A whopping 82 percent voted in favor of the measure that forbids selling eggs, veal, or pork from animals who were confined in cages where they could not stand up, lie down, turn around, or extend their limbs.
Bromfield voters were most closely divided on the question of legalizing marijuana for recreational use (Question 4). They rejected legalization by 53 percent to 47 percent, the narrowest margin of any of the items on the ballot. By contrast, their elders narrowly supported legalization in Tuesday’s election.
Overall voter turnout at Bromfield was significantly lower for this election than the nearly 500 students, faculty, and staff (about 58 percent) who voted in the 2008 mock election, when Barack Obama first ran for the presidency.
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