The Bracelet: A Story About Bonnet Shores and What Happens When You Defend Democracy
In the summer of 2021, a full-time resident of Bonnet Shores walked to her own neighborhood’s annual meeting to participate in her own community’s election. She had lived there for years. She paid taxes there. She was a registered voter at that address.
Instead of a ballot, she was handed a problem. The bracelet.
Without the bracelet — distributed by the Fire District to those it deemed eligible to vote — you could not speak. You could not vote. You could not enter the tent where your own community’s future was being decided. And so she stood outside with reporters. A full-time resident, a registered voter, a taxpayer — watching her own community’s election from beyond the rope line like a stranger at someone else’s party.
Reporters were there. They saw everything. They wrote it down.
https://upriseri.com/bonnet-shores-fire-district-election-night/
Inside the tent, the math told the story clearly. Somewhere between 700 and 800 people had gathered in person. A total 2,754 votes were cast for Council positions. Proxy votes — carried in on behalf of joint owners of 930 cabanas, bathhouses, and changing closets, some no larger than sixteen square feet, all part of one single commercial property with shared ownership — outnumbered in-person votes more than two to one. Realty companies voted. Limited liability companies voted. Family trusts voted. People who had never set foot in Bonnet Shores voted. The woman who lived there year-round did not.
A council candidate — himself a beach club shareholder with an obvious stake in keeping things exactly as they were — approached her outside the tent. In front of a reporter, he told her she didn’t belong there. She told him she was a taxpayer and a full-time resident. He told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. She asked him to leave her alone.
He walked away. She stayed.
She had already helped file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the very system that had just handed a bracelet to a beach closet and denied one to her. The ACLU of Rhode Island filed a friend of the court brief calling the District’s voting rules “a throwback to earlier, long-discredited notions of who is entitled to participate in our state and local government.” The Rhode Island Secretary of State had written to the District in 2019 warning that its Charter was unconstitutional. The District responded by refusing to second the motion to even discuss the letter.
They had been told. They chose not to listen.
In 2022 a Superior Court Consent Judgment confirmed what she had always known: the voting framework was unconstitutional.
In 2024 the election was held at the beach club. A beach club employee followed her for three hours — aggressively filming her with a spotlight, loudly and publicly taunting her, threatening to search her — while she tried to vote. She filed a police report.
In 2025 she was elected to the District Council.
The Charter amendment is still pending before the Rhode Island General Assembly. Three Council seats are up for election at the June 2026 Annual Meeting.
The bracelet people are still angry.
But she’s still here. And so are the residents whose rights she continues to fight for. We are not giving up and we are not going anywhere.
More than 500 residents and supporters have already signed this petition calling for change. Please continue to share this petition, contact your state representative and senator, and stand up to those who think that they can override democracy with a paper bracelet.