On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Secretary of State certified what most people around the country already knew: the Bay State is weird. Even as the rest of the country showed near-record apathy on Election Day, Massachusetts voters came out in droves.
According to Secretary of State William F. Galvin, 3,184,196 people cast their ballots in the Bay State on Election Day—73.3 percent of registered voters. That's up slightly from the previous record of 3,102,995 who came out to vote in 2008. Much of that high turnout is attributed to the highly competitive U.S. Senate race between Senator Scott Brown and former Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. The popularity of both candidates and Warren's unprecedented "Get Out the Vote" efforts combined to generate a wave of electoral participation. Or maybe voters were just excited about the chance to legalize medical marijuana? Galvin said that measure, which passed on Election Day, will come into effect January 1.
