April 14-2026 Annual Town Election Information

Election Day Voting:

• • Polls for South Hadley’s Annual Election are open from 7:00am to 8:00pm on Election Day, Tuesday, April 14, 2026, for in-person voting. All precincts vote at South Hadley High School, 153 Newton St (Rt 116). Ballots for each precinct can be viewed at: www.southhadley.org/1088/Sample-Ballot. To check your registration and receipt of a mail-in ballot, see: www.VoteinMA.com
  • Separate elections for Fire/Water Districts 1 and 2 are also held at the High School. Ballots can be viewed at: District 1: www.shdistrict1.org | District 2: www.shdistrict2.org

Election Results:

• • After the polls close at 8:00pm, there are three separate tallies that the Board of Registrars (BoR) needs to review and combine for full and accurate results:
    1) Election day votes
    2) advance mail-in and early/absentee votes
    3) hand-counted votes

• 1) Tally tapes from in-person voting on election day (similar to a cash register receipt) will be printed from each of the 5 precinct voting machines located at the high school. There are 5 machines because there are 5 precincts (A, B, C, D, and E). The tally tapes contain all of the elected positions, town meeting members for each precinct, and the ballot questions.
• 2) Tally tapes with results for in-person absentee/early ballots and vote-by-mail ballots received by Sunday, April 12 are tallied separately for each precinct through a process known advanced processing. This means that there will be 5 additional tally tapes printed to document these results (one for each precinct). By law, these cannot be printed until the polls close.
• In total, 10 printed tally tapes, (2 sets for each district as outlined above), will be posted on the wall in the hallway outside of the gymnasium. It is anticipated these will be posted by 9:00pm. These early results will need to be added together.
• 3) In addition, there will likely be ballots that must be hand counted.
  This means that they were not processed by the voting machines (for example, a ballot with a write-in must be hand counted). These hand count results then need to be added to the tally tape results to provide a full count of all received ballots.
• The BoR is prioritizing reporting out unofficial results of the ballot questions and then will move on to processing results for town-wide elected positions, followed by Town Meeting Members.
• If election results appear close, the BoR will wait until the hand count is complete to release unofficial results. Otherwise, the BoR will seek to post unofficial results of the ballot questions from the totals of the two sets of printed tally tapes as soon as possible.
• When available, unofficial results will be posted to the South Hadley Elections pages on the Town website (See: southhadley.org/Elections) and will be shared as a Community News item from the Town of South Hadley page and Facebook pages.
• If you have questions or would like to learn more about the tallying process, please contact the Town Clerk’s Office.