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Whether a board of directors is electing new leadership, shareholders are voting on corporate resolutions, a labor union is conducting member elections, or an association is gathering attendee feedback during a conference, one concern remains constant: How can participants trust that every vote is legitimate? The answer lies not simply in using electronic voting technology, but in selecting a system designed with multiple layers of security, accountability, and transparency.

With the fall New England town meeting season knocking on the doors, we were reminded why town meetings are so important—and most demanding—times of year for local government. Across communities, clerks, moderators, administrators, finance teams, boards, committees, and residents came together to review budgets, debate warrant articles and make decisions that shape the year ahead.

In today’s fast-paced governance environment, public sector organizations are expected to make critical decisions with greater efficiency and transparency than ever before. Whether determining legislative priorities, electing officials, approving local ordinances, or measuring constituent sentiment during town meetings and public hearings, representatives need access to accurate feedback in real time. This is where real-time voting technology is transforming the way government and civic bodies make decisions.

As businesses continue to modernize their processes, the differences between electronic voting and traditional forms of voting have become increasingly important. Here are the key comparisons of cost, speed, and accuracy between electronic voting and traditional forms of vote counting such-as show of hands, “Yea/Nay,” and paper ballots.

For years, manual vote-counting methods like “Yea or Nay”, raise-of-hands, and paper ballots have reigned supreme in the voting and election processes of businesses, towns and cities, unions, associations, and more. Here some fun facts about how e-voting can modernize and streamline vote-counting in 2025 and beyond.

In light of Echo360 and TurningPoint ceasing rentals of their electronic voting products, we’d like to welcome former users to the Meridia family! Give us a call or request a quote and take advantage of our years of experience, cutting-edge technology, and custom development.

We’ve worked with a dozen or so of Seventh-Day Adventist conferences around the US from Oregon to Texas, South Carolina, and now with their Northeastern Conference as well. This September, we were invited to provide electronic voting for the Northeastern Conference in Hartford, CT.

So far, 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 which broke the previous record of 1,300 voters at Special Town Meeting in Westwood during COVID. We had our first 3,000-person General Business Session with AEAONMS in New Orleans and we had 1,800-person Special Town Meeting in Longmeadow on September 9th, 2025.

Each year, we collaborate with the NAACP as well as the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (AEAONMS) for their business meetings. Both events were a resounding success, as TownVOTE voting system and keypads captured the votes of thousands of delegates at a record pace.

With the spring town meeting season in full swing, we’ve had some exciting developments in the world of electronic voting in the past several weeks. Since March, we’ve helped to modernize over thirty town meetings, helped pass some controversial, high-profile articles and motions, and even broke a record! Here are some notable facts about the Spring 2025 town meeting season.

The New Jersey Courts integrated electronic voting into their jury deliberation and prosecution case evaluation some time ago, but in late fall of 2024, multiple of their vicinages incorporating Meridia keypads and software in their court sessions.

With 2025 right around the corner, we’ve been reminiscing on collaborations with two high-profile clients, the Michigan Farm Bureau and Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, as well as making our fourth appearance at the New England Association of Town Clerks’ annual conference in Rhode Island.

For years, manual vote-counting methods like “Yea or Nay”, raise-of-hands, and paper ballots have reigned supreme in the voting and election processes of businesses, towns and cities, unions, associations, and more. Here some fun facts about how e-voting can modernize and streamline vote-counting in 2025 and beyond.

Electronic voting is increasingly used in various settings, from government elections to corporate boardrooms. But how does it stack up against traditional voting methods like voice voting or a show of hands? Here are the pros and cons of e-voting, particularly in the context of business, town, and organizational meetings.

With the Fall season getting into full swing, we’ve been hard at work helping organizations, small governments, and businesses alike to modernize the way they collect and tabulate votes. Over the past few months, we made appearances at the NECA 29th annual convention, Rehoboth’s 2024 Special Town Meeting, as well as our debut appearance at the Maine Municipal Association Convention, where we’ve been introducing town clerks and local government admins to the world of electronic voting!

As a newcomer to the world of electronic voting, the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (AEAONMS) had several unique conditions for their 131st imperial council session on August 20th. Convening at the Sheraton and Marriott hotels in New Orleans, the organization utilized TownVOTE during two electoral voting sessions for the Nobles and Daughters of the Order. The system handled the tasks with ease, automatically counting the votes of almost 2,000 delegates in a large conference room venue.

We’re happy to announce that as of August 2024, over 70 New England towns are now utilizing TownVOTE electronic voting system! Marblehead chose a semi-permanent multi-building installation, while Westford battled two postponements and finally held their vote in a football field. We also welcomed 10 new towns to our Meridia family and in time for the spring town meeting season.

We’ve had our hands full in the month of July, as we provided on-site technical support for two high profile clients: the American Postal Workers’ Union (APWU), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Utilizing TownVOTE, the two organizations voted electronically on various articles and motions, streamlining their voting process and achieving a highly accurate result on particularly contentious votes.

Since 2018, we’ve partnered with the House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources, who primarily use the system to record votes at their markup meetings. Given their continued success with using the system and Meridia’s proven track record for providing prompt and personalized customer service, it was only natural for our relationship with the House to expand to include six more representative committees who are now utilizing TownVOTE for their meetings.

Since 2018, we’ve partnered with the House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources, who primarily use the system to record votes at their markup meetings. Given their continued success with using the system and Meridia’s proven track record for providing prompt and personalized customer service, it was only natural for our relationship with the House to expand to include six more representative committees who are now utilizing TownVOTE for their meetings.

As fall town meeting season draws near, we’ve been hard at work providing on-site technical support for voting sessions of all sizes. We had incredible success working with two high profile organizations – the NAACP and Moravian Church Synod, and aim to continue the trend as New England towns get ready to utilize electronic voting in their town meetings to vote on important issues that affect their communities.

As the NAACP’s biggest event of the year and second in-person meeting since 2019, the stakes were high during the organization’s 114th national convention held in Boston. Starting on July 28th and running till August 1st, hundreds of voting delegates convened in Boston to vote on a variety of hot-button topics like LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, environmental protection, police training, and more.

In a world where technology is rapidly shaping various aspects of our lives, it comes as no surprise that even traditional institutions like the Moravian Church are embracing digital innovations. The recent Moravian Church Synod held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, made waves by adopting an electronic voting system. This move marked a significant step forward, streamlining the voting process and ensuring greater inclusivity and transparency within the congregation.

Whether it be Seventh Day Adventists, the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League, or the Snoqualmie Indian tribe, religious and tribal organizations across the country are meeting to elect officials and make important decisions for the future. That’s why religious and tribal groups of all sizes have been making the switch to Meridia’s TownVOTE electronic voting system, which proved to be the perfect alternative to the time-consuming process of counting votes manually.

Since April, over 20 New England towns have conducted their annual meetings with the help of TownVOTE electronic voting software. Once a year (and sometimes more) towns across Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut come together in a formal setting to discuss, debate, and decide on matters that impact their lives and communities.

Since 2018, we’ve partnered with the House Committee on Natural Resources, who utilizes TownVOTE and clickers to record the votes at their Markup Meetings. After previously using a lengthy voting process that involved individually recording the votes of each house member, the electronic voting allowed the committee to significantly cut down on the time for each vote while instantly confirming their results with visual vote confirmation.

Meetings can take place in a variety of locations, especially after COVID-19 restricted in-person meetings like never before. While we can handle the unconventional voting locations (e.g., airport strips, empty warehouses, and more), we wanted to evolve our electronic voting systems to allow for in-person and remote participants to vote as if they were sitting in the same room.

Managing debates and discussion during your meetings can be a tricky task- especially when multiple speakers are expected to take the microphone to argue for or against certain motions. That’s why we’d like to introduce TownVOTE’s new Pre-Vote screen and Speaker’s Queue. Now, users have the ability to manage speakers, set a timer, and take notes all in one convenient location.

When it comes to group voting in a professional setting, having the proper security measures in place is of utmost importance to ensure a smooth experience and accurate results. It’s unacceptable to have a voting session interrupted, or worse, find out that the results of a vote have been affected by an unknown source in any way.

As offline, short-range RF voting systems are not vulnerable from internet-based attacks or distance attacks they are only susceptible to the bad actors who are within a short range of your voting event.

Recognized as one of the nation’s leading educational events, the Illinois Association of School Boards’ Joint Annual Conference is the association’s biggest meeting of the year, encompassing school boards, superintendents, school business officials, and more.

The Battle of the Minds is The Centre Volunteers in Medicine’s signature fundraising event, where participants gather for a gala dinner with a twist; each table participates in a fast-paced trivia game show!
With the help of Meridia’s voting keypads and PowerPoint plugin software, the CVIM was able to make the Battle of the Minds trivia game show fully interactive with a dynamically updating leaderboard.

Every five years, various 7th Day Adventist conferences meet to discuss and deliberate issues, bylaw changes, and more. Traditionally, all voting during these events was handled by pen-and-paper ballots and manual vote-counting. While this process allowed the conferences to conduct a secret ballot, the process was often stressful, tedious, and time-consuming.

Meridia was called on by the NAACP to provide an electronic voting system for 3,500 delegates at their July 14-20th 2022 Annual Convention in Atlantic City, NJ. This year, in their first in-person meeting since 2019, for the first time in their 113-year history, NAACP chose to move away from voice and paper voting.

The Churches of God Eastern Regional Conference had used paper ballots for many years before switching to Meridia’s TownVOTE electronic voting system in April 2022. During this meeting, the conference used electronic voting for the first time to vote on new council members, as well as a large vote for a delegation of people they plan to send to their national conference.

The democratic process can be found in organizations large and small, and nowhere is this more true than the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League, where the organization conducted two types of votes to elect their president and select grant funding with the help of TownVOTE electronic voting software and keypads.

Yale University’s CELI summit started working with Meridia in 2020 when they purchased 300 keypads for use in their quarterly meetings. Since then, we’ve created custom-filtered Powerpoint slides that audience members can interact and vote on, as well as elegant, custom Yale-themed membrane for the keypads.

The 2022 town meeting season is in full swing, with dozens of New England towns convening once again to vote on issues that affect their lives and communities.

The town of Sterling, MA used Meridia’s voting keypads and software during the Pandemic in 2020, and 2021 to hold a massive outdoor meeting at their local airport. Now their 2022 town meeting brought them back indoors, proving the flexibility and speed of the EZ-VOTE electronic voting system and keypads.

In their new faced-paced segment, WeTweet, Jimmy Fallon and the Tonight Show teamed up with Meridia to engage their audience with custom EZ-VOTE keypads. With three simple options, “Yes, No, or Abstain,” and the ability to count votes automatically, the system was a breeze to use for Jimmy and everyone involved.

Chicago City Council finally decided to purchase an electronic voting system for $500,000, they were aiming to simplify, speed up and organize their voting process and bring it to the 21st century. Let’s see how their voting system compares to what Meridia offers.

Meridia’s software and hardware serves a wide array of public – including those with visual impairment.  For those who have color-blindness, are hard-of-seeing or legally blind, voting on important issues in their community can be difficult using electronic devices.

We have worked with our clients and developed a keypad that not only gives the user haptic feedback they need in order to know whether they are pushing an actual button, but also provides a Braille symbol for Yes, No, and Abstain vote. Plus, it makes a sound when you push the button, so you know you voted.

When the Live! Casino & Hotel came to us with a request to use the clickers as a method to play a cutthroat, “Winner Takes All” game at their property in Philly, we didn’t hesitate for a minute. The first game took place on November 20, 2021 and the second on February 19, 2022.

With each successive round promising a higher cash prize at the risk of going home with nothing, the stakes were high as the entire game was controlled through Meridia’s voting software and keypads.

After the success of their special October meeting, the town of Westwood placed an order for 2,000 new keypads, four receivers, and custom membranes to ensure faster, easier group voting for future meetings.

Eastern PA Youth Soccer Association (EPYSA) hired Meridia to provide electronic voting services with weighted voting for their February 27th business meeting in Plymouth Meeting, PA.
Since the event was fully virtual, all the voting had to happen remotely, via our CloudVOTE service.

NY State Democratic Party owns a 300-keypad electronic voting system from Meridia Interactive Solutions that allows them to compile weighted votes from each delegate, their proxies, and visually display the voting process in real time. For their Party Convention on February 17th, Meridia also provided expert on-site technical support at the New York’s Sheraton Time Square Hotel as the stakes were high in nominating the Party’s candidate for the New York Governor.

When Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation reached out to us about their upcoming game show and the need to integrate audience clickers into the meeting program, we were ready. We’ve done similar programs for two other NY Jewish communities that needed a fun, engaging and memorable game show experience.

Towns like Stow, Raynham or Seekonk had to use multi-room voting to accommodate the need for social distancing when a single space couldn’t hold enough residents. The solution Meridia can provide covers two rooms with a single receiver, extending the reception range and enabling every vote to be counted.

The Michigan Farm Bureau was met with some unique challenges during their November 30th meeting. With pandemic restrictions in mind, a portion of voters needed a way to stay connected throughout the meeting remotely. By utilizing CloudVOTE software along with Zoom, the Bureau held a hybrid meeting where everyone felt like they were in the same room.

The town of Seekonk, MA implemented electronic voting systems for the first time during their November 8th fall town meeting, allowing them to vote, tabulate, and record the results of their Warrant articles and amendments quickly, accurately, and efficiently.

Holding a large outdoor voting session can be complicated event, but not for the town of Westwood, MA. By implementing Meridia’s TownVOTE electronic voting system into their most recent special town meeting, they made it accurate, secure, and fast to register over 1,000 votes in a contentious vote to approve borrowing of $84,610,386 for a new school.

Meridia Interactive Solutions announced at a Massachusetts Town Clerks Association Convention a new milestone of 30 municipalities that use the TownVOTE Electronic Voting System. Town Clerks and Town Moderators benefit from an instant motion resolution and residents’ votes stay anonymous.

TownVOTE software displays its content on projector screens and smartphone displays, so it’s crucial that every piece of information is able to be easily read and interpreted by everyone, including those with auditory disabilities like color blindness. TownVOTE has been redesigned to include instantly recognizable indicators in the new High Contrast mode.

Accountability, accuracy, and attention to detail are all components that make up a great police training program. With the use of audience response clickers and software, trainers can increase interactivity during sessions while monitoring performance in real-time with automatic recordkeeping.

Focus group research can be a blessing and a curse for both the companies that seek the insights and for those who conduct the research. The findings can mean the difference between product launch success and failure, so it’s crucial to put the right questions to the right people and to capture unbiased answers—and that’s often harder than it sounds.

The choice between holding a public or anonymous voting session can have a great impact on your participants’ voting experience as well as the overall outcome.   

VA Farm Bureau had their online/virtual meeting all planned out when their requirements changed and suddenly, they had to connect multiple different locations in a way that they can all vote remotely, and yet, as if they were all sitting in the same room.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives’ 2021 meeting was hardly a conventional one. In an effort to reduce person-to-person contact, representatives opted for a drive-in outdoor voting session from the comfort of their own cars.

Town of Stow, MA was facing a unique challenge for their town meeting – how to seat their residents indoor and outdoor and still receive all the votes just as if they were all sitting in the same room.
Click on Read More to find out.

For an electoral assembly met with COVID-19 restrictions, such as the Virginia Farm Bureau, amending the voting process presents several unique challenges. Instead of meeting for three days as a single group of 200 members, they decided to split up to 14 different locations around their state and vote electronically.

Town of Wenham, MA decided that an electronic voting system can solve their dilemma with a contentious town meeting that needed to have a public voting option while taking place outdoors.

New England Town Meeting Voting is not known for social distancing. Usually several hundred citizens squeeze into a meeting room or gymnasium and vote on local matters dear to their hearts. So how do you do ‘contactless voting’ and accommodate COVID-19 restrictions into your voting sessions?

The residents of Leicester, MA got together on September 26th in record-breaking numbers to vote on a proposition to borrow $91 million to relocate one of their schools.

An audience response system enables the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to vote on annual meeting measures in a fraction of the time the scantron systems used to take. “We’ve taken what had been a 45-minute process and reduced it to 10 minutes,” says Jeremiah Mustered, Executive Assistant to the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

Clickers need not always tally important votes.

When you’re planning the interactive quiz show part of an annual social gathering that will involve more than 1,300 women ranging in age from their early 20s to their late 70s, it’s tough to find something that will entertain and engage everyone.

Town Meeting in any New England town ought to be a simple thing. A motion is brought to a vote and people hold colored cards in the air to indicate whether or not they support the motion. If the color associated with the Ayes dominates the color associated with the Nays, they Ayes have it. That’s pretty straightforward. Shouldn’t take a lot of time.

Town of Uxbridge, MA replaced its tradition of colored cards with an electronic voting system that enabled residents to vote immediately and anonymously.

Since the earliest days, the annual Town Meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts has been rife with passion when questions are put on the table relating to the public funding of schools. In 1732, the town had to hold two votes before it could set aside the funds for a school.

Church membership is in decline, and the parish church is feeling it most acutely. Strengthening the community may involve changing the community, and that’s rarely easy.

Like many religious institutions in the United States, the Catholic Church has struggled over the last decades. Fewer families are joining established churches and parishes are shrinking. What changes needed to be made to ensure the vitality of the Pittsburgh Diocese?

Industrial training programs, whether they are on-the-job-training programs, off-the-job-training programs, or even job simulation programs, are key to ensuring the quality and effectiveness of employees.

More than 10 million people in the greater New York metropolitan region rely on Con Edison (ConEd) to keep the lights blazing, the gas burning in their furnaces, and the steam running through their pipes. But who empowers the employees of ConEd when it comes to ensuring that this sprawling service and delivery infrastructure is operating properly?

Maine has implemented ranked choice voting for both its federal and state elections. Localities in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and half a dozen other states have adopted it for municipal elections. But what is ranked choice voting?

A medical education requires a good mind, lot of money, and an extraordinary ability to forego sleep. That latter requirement presents no small amount of irony, given that sleep is critical to brain function and information retention.

Is there a consensus about the efficacy and value of using ARS in the healthcare classroom? Turns out there is. The literature review identified nine positive aspects of using ARS in the healthcare classroom.

The enactment of laws, even the approval of committee rules, rarely proceeds without some level of discussion if not outright contention. Opinions get expressed, arms get twisted, voices get raised. It’s not unusual for parties privy to the discussion to introduce alternative wordings or entire legislative amendments to a matter that will eventually be put to a vote.

We’ve written about burnout before as it relates to physicians. But nurse burnout is no less real, as anyone following the news today will know. Some 2,200 burned out nurses walked off the job in Chicago in mid-September. A day later there were strikes in California, Arizona and Florida.

What is stress? Let’s see: How about police or military personnel finding themselves faced with difficult shoot/no-shoot decisions. To be sure, the possibility of getting shot is definitely a cause of stress, and the symptoms of stress in those situations are very clear. Time horizons contract and the immediacy of the situation can overwhelm all else; the fight or flight impulse can take over, sometimes with disastrous effects.

Educational researchers looking at active learning continue to extol its virtues. Active learning – which involves students actively engaging in the classroom and using active listening skills and skills to formulate meaning – has been credited with increasing student retention in both the short and long terms.

The bloggers at Meridia Interactive Solutions have posted several articles about the use of audience response systems (ARS) in school settings – mostly showcasing the value of ARS when it comes to pre-testing students, facilitating student engagement in sensitive conversations, and the like. Those make perfect sense, but the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) showed me a whole new role for ARS in an educational setting: RIT used ARS to help calm the frayed nerves of parents dropping their kids off for freshman orientation.

The hashtag at the heart of the #metoo movement first appeared two years ago this month. The #timesup hashtag showed up not long after that. Both are painful reminders of a long dark history of gender violence that lots of people have just not wanted to think about or hear about.

It’s curious: each month, Google gets hundreds of thousands of queries on terms such as “pedagogy” and “student engagement,” on “outcome studies,” “audience response systems,” and “classroom response systems.” But it gets virtually no queries linking these ideas together.

A recent paper on Audience Response Systems and Missingness Trends in JMIR Formative Research identified an issue that educators need to pay attention to when using ARS to discuss sensitive issues in a school setting. As we’ve noted elsewhere in discussing the value of using ARS to facilitate active student engagement, the anonymity of ARS can help shy students overcome their reticence and diffidence. It can give a voice to students who feel uncomfortable sharing the reality of their experiences.

You’ve heard the terms positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement usually takes the form of a reward given for actively behaving a certain way. Negative reinforcement takes the form of a reward given for not engaging in a specific kind of behavior.

One question that frequently challenges the cooperative principles that should be guiding a housing cooperative is the question of cumulative voting vs. straight voting. Both cumulative voting and straight voting are accepted ways to conduct the nomination and election of board members, but the different outcomes they produce could result in different people becoming involved in the management of a cooperative.

How can an online voting system or electronic voting system help a housing cooperative? Every co-op board runs into voting situations that are nuanced and that’s where the electronic voting provides anonymity, transparency, speed and permanent record needed to make the right decisions.

Reticence. It’s a fancy word that means a “reluctance to speak about something” and reticence is often the last thing that a board wants to encounter when asking voters to speak their minds.

“Laws are like sausages,” is it said. “Best not to see them being made.”
While that may be true for most people, if you’re a member of a conference committee or a subcommittee charged with creating laws, you need to pay close attention to how those laws are made.

As part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, all non-profit hospitals must conduct a community health assessment (CHA) every three years. Such assessments—sometimes called just a “community health needs assessment (CHNA)”—are important because what a given community needs in the way of health care services will change over time, and the assessments provide a mechanism by which the hospitals to stay on top of the needs of the community.

Interacting with students can be tricky, particularly if you are seeking active engagement on sensitive topics. We’ve already written about how some educators are using audience response systems (ARS) to present interactive classroom programs on sexual health, but topics that are ostensibly far less delicate can also benefit from the use of a classroom response system.

All cooperatives have at their core the same fundamental principles: The cooperative—or co-op—is owned and managed by its members, all of whom share in the profits or benefits of the co-op itself.

What is bullet voting? Basically, bullet voting—also known as single-shot voting or plump voting—is a tactic used when voters who could vote for multiple candidates actually vote only for the one candidate whom they most want to see among the winners.

Every organization has a leadership team – whether that’s headed by a team captain or a club president. And while there are club apps and apps for team management, those don’t really address questions related club voting, let alone team or club roles and responsibilities. They’re more about scheduling events and managing member. The election of club officers remains an unsupported issue.

Credit Unions distinguish themselves from other financial institutions in many ways, but one of the most basic arises from the fact that they are governed by the members of the institution. Section 111 of the Federal Credit Union Act (Revised) specifies that members shall elect the credit union’s board of directors from their own ranks.

Remember the hanging chad? That something so slight – a tiny fillip of paper dangling from the back of a punch card ballot – could result in the declaration of a spoiled ballot still rankles a large portion of the American electorate.

Okay, class, raise your hand if you’ve had chlamydia. Hmm. Nobody? What about syphilis? Still no one? And you’re teens? You surprise me. I suppose I don’t even need to ask about HIV…

The formal study of organizational culture is relatively young, dating back only to the 1950s. Even providing an organizational culture definition—that is, defining what you mean when talking about organizational culture—can be tricky. Organizational culture isn’t the same as organizational structure. Rather, it’s the attitude that holds together the structure, that lubricates the gears and, ideally, enables processes to occur without friction.

Ask anyone in the US whether we use a first-past-the-post system for voting and the likely response is, um, maybe? Do we use a winner-take-all-system? A plurality/majority system? A proportional or semi-proportional system?

Police training is a serious matter, particularly when it comes to use of deadly force. Under what circumstances does an officer merely put his or her hand on the holster? Draw a gun? Under what circumstances should the officer actually fire the weapon?

Me Too. Times Up. That these movements exist tell us that there’s a serious problem that we as a society have to solve, but the fact that the words are usually preceded by hashtags— #meetoo and #timesup— tells us that these words are more often written than they are vocalized.