It took less than a week for the town clerk to certify my signatures and get my nomination paper stamped by three of the town’s registrars of voters. Why does it take three registrars to certify that a candidate is registered to vote at the address she says she’s registered at? I don’t know, but as a Massachusetts native I’m sure that past political shenanigans made this precaution seem prudent.

Anyway, the town clerk called me, and I went down to town hall to pick my paper up.

Five of my 29 signatures turned out to be invalid: three because the voters didn’t give their street addresses, one because the signature was illegible, and one (I think) because the voter printed her name instead of signing it. Memo to self: If you ever do this again, pay closer attention to what your signers are doing or not doing.

That still left me with 24 valid signatures, 14 more than I needed, so I photocopied both sides of the paper and mailed the original off to the secretary of state’s office. Massachusetts being one of the four states that is officially a commonwealth, William F. Galvin is officially the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, but even state documents sometimes call him the secretary of state. The nation’s secretary of state deals with foreign policy. The commonwealth’s secretary of state administers elections, publishes and distributes an array of documents, and manages all sorts of written records, among other things.

Yesterday I received confirmation that my papers had been received on June 15. I am now officially “on ballot unless otherwise notified.”

The first item on the checklist is my signature following the statement “I accept the nomination.” The enrollment certificate is those three registrars swearing that I live where I say I live. The ethics receipt signifies that I’ve filed the Statement of Financial Interests with the State Ethics Commission. That’s the biggest hurdle this newbie candidate has cleared yet. A gold star would have been appreciated, but I’ll settle for the checkmark.

What’s really astonishing about this is that nomination papers aren’t due at the town clerk’s office till July 31 and they don’t have to be filed with the secretary of the commonwealth until August 28. I’m a chronically just-under-the-wire girl, and not infrequently I’m a little bit late. (Fashionably late? Never!) This time I’m two and a half months early.

This is good. Thursday night I’m going to my first Martha’s Vineyard Commission meeting since last fall. Commissioner Lenny Jason plans to introduce another motion to rescind the roundabout vote. If I weren’t on record as having accepted the nomination, I might decide (not for the first time) that running for the MVC is a monumentally stupid idea.

Or maybe I’ll decide that running is a good idea and it would even be OK if I got elected. I hear there were some fireworks at the last meeting, when Lenny merely announced that his intention to file another rescission motion. This part of the meeting seems to have gone missing from the MVTV video record. I’m taking my Flip camcorder just in case.

P.S. an hour later: I just watched the last few minutes of the June 7 MVC meeting. Lenny gets the floor around 2:52 and the tape ends when the chair closes the meeting at almost 3:08. Most of the discussion is about procedure. If there were any fireworks, they happened after the meeting. I’m taking my Flip anyway.