Winthrop’s town officials reversed their earlier position and agreed that a recall question against Town Council member Max Tassinari would be put on the November ballot, while Mr Tassinari filed a complaint with state elections officials alleging ethical and jurisdictional violations in the process.

In a single-sentence decision, the Winthrop town clerk, Denise Quist, said Monday that she was accepting the position of the town’s Board of Registrars of Voters – even though she and the Winthrop town attorney, Jim Cipoletta, were directly warned by a state elections official earlier in the day that they were improperly giving authority to the registrars.

“We expect that after consultation with him,” Michelle Tassinari, director of the Elections Division of the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, wrote to Ms Quist, with reference to Mr Cipoletta, “you will confirm that you are NOT printing the recall question on the municipal election ballot.” Ms Tassinari is not related to Max Tassinari, who is also a state employee.

The case stems from an ongoing campaign by a group of Winthrop residents and out-of-town allies that have been fighting the state law known as 3A that requires nearly all cities and towns around Boston to expand multifamily housing zones or face cuts in state funding. The state law doesn’t actually require any new housing in Winthrop, because of the town’s existing high density. But the state law has generated heated arguments as a proxy for pro-housing attitudes, and Mr Tassinari is one of several Town Council members in Winthrop to face recall threats over the matter.

The recall campaign garnered 1,992 confirmed signatures from town voters who favor putting the question of Mr Tassinari’s removal from office on the November ballot, far short of the 2,863 signatures that town officials said it needed. Town officials initially affirmed the failure of the recall effort, but the recall campaign organizers immediately claimed that they actually needed far few signatures – suggesting the actual threshold is, or should be, just 20 percent of all voters in the most recent town election, rather than 20 percent of all registered voters.

Prolonged examination

The reversal by Ms Quist follows several days of closed-door debates over how to handle the fact that the Board of Registrars – despite previous warnings from both town and state officials that it did not have jurisdiction in the matter, and that the recall proponents were wrong on the vote threshold figure – proceeded with a hearing last week in which the board’s three appointed members all backed the recall effort.

All three of those registrars are also among the 1,992 town residents who signed the petition against Mr Tassinari, and they did not disclose that fact during their hearing and their vote on the matter. The three registrars also described themselves as having jointly reached an opinion on the topic ahead of their public meeting, in a potential violation of open-meeting rules.

Mr Tassinari filed his petition with the Elections Division of the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts hours ahead of Ms Quist’s announcement. At that point, he was protesting the lack of any firm decision from Ms Quist even though she and Mr Cipoletta had been agreeing with his side on both the 20 percent threshold and the registrars’ lack of jurisdiction in deciding the matter.

When Ms Quist eventually produced her order on Monday, she offered no explanation for why she had chosen to accept the decision of the registrars in favor of certifying the recall petition.

The Winthrop Town Council president, Jim Letterie, has not commented on the ruling by Ms Quist. He previously suggested that he generally saw the 2,863-signature level as the correct threshold and expected that the registrars likely did not have the authority to rule on the recall petition.

Another Town Council member, Joseph Aiello, has called the overall matter an embarrassment for the town. The failure of the three appointed registrars to acknowledge their backing of the Tassinari recall effort, and to therefore publicly consider the possible need for their own recusal, “is a clear conflict of interest,” Mr Aiello said.

“This is crazy-ville,” Mr Aiello said of the Board of Registrars’ intervention and the town’s failure to fix it. “This makes this small part of the town government look like a banana republic.”