With higher voter turnouts and an ever-growing list of municipalities hopping on the bandwagon, this year has been about breaking our own electronic voting records.
We had our first 1,700-person town meeting at a gym in Marblehead in May where the 1,700 votes were collected in under 1.5 minutes. The previous record was 1,300 people during a COVID meeting in Westwood at their football field.
We had our first 3,000-person General Business Session with AEAONMS in New Orleans, where they elected 9 officials (in two runoffs) in under 2 minutes per seat.
This was also the year when we broke through 30+ town meetings assisted by our electronic voting system and on-site staff in just the spring season (Mar – June). Many dozens more were conducted by the town’s own staff, though.
And this was also the year when the Longmeadow Special Town Meeting that took place on September 9th, 2025 was feared to be so large that four different locations were prepared to take over 3,000 voters and when over 1,800 showed up, we filled the Gym, the Auditorium and partially the Cafe at a local High School.
But thanks to the great work on the Moderator’s part, and the speed of the voting system, it wasn’t a long meeting. We started (almost) promptly at 7:20pm and were done debating and taking three votes before the clock hit 9:30pm.
The Warrant only had one article in it: the appropriation of over $150 million for the construction of a new Middle School in town. But we also had a strongly supported amendment and motion to “Call the Question” to deal with.
The town opted for a longer voting period – about 2 minutes, but with four receivers staged across the three rooms, we counted over 1,700 votes in under a minute. When the electronic vote was closed with 1,770 on the main motion, we just took some time to add the manual votes from ADA-friendly locations over the phone, text and email, and the total vote count ended up being 1776, which is a great coincidence, but also the newest record in our voting system history.
Overall, this meeting, and additionally this year has been full of successful events where we helped the direct or representative democratic processes to move faster and more efficiently forward.
