Meridia has a strong, long-standing position providing electronic voting to religious business meetings in general, but specifically, we work with a dozen or so of Seventh-Day Adventists 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 at the CT Convention Center in Hartford, CT. It was a larger gathering of about 1,200 delegates who had a few elections to get through, and we helped them get it done accurately, and in a speedy manner.
While the organization’s September meeting marks the first use of electronic voting for the Northeastern Conference, Seventh-Day adventists all over the country have been making use of electronic voting for several years. In 2022, the South Atlantic and South Central Conferences opted to utilize TownVOTE for their meetings, after receiving a glowing recommendation from other Adventist branches.
In the meeting, the delegates voted to accept committee reports and elect their nominees for Treasurer, Executive Secretary, and President. We had to use our advanced wireless setup with multiple antennas to ensure that with over 1,000 people voting at any given moment, we received every vote accurately, but also quickly. We clocked in 1,000 votes in less than a minute; a significant departure from the slow process of counting manual votes in past meetings.
“Utilizing Meridia voting systems was one of the best decisions we have made. We were accustomed to voting by paper ballots which had its challenges both with time and anonymity. The electronic voting system cut down our voting time greatly, provided voters anonymity, and was very cost effective.”
-–Jason North, Seventh-Day Adventist Church Southwest Region
Traditionally, Seventh Day Adventist conferences used secret ballots and hand/voice voting during their meetings, with the exact process varying from branch to branch. Both forms of voting came with significant disadvantages, as secret ballots are typically lengthy and time-consuming, whereas hand and voice votes lack anonymity and are susceptible to herd-mentality, which can affect the results. Conducting a secret ballot required each ballot to be manually handed out and collected to count each vote, dramatically increasing the length of the voting session. Hand and voice voting, while typically faster than conducting a secret ballot, is often unreliable during contentious votes as the exact count of “Yes” and “No” cannot be determined, making the final result little more than an “educated guess” by the moderators.
TownVOTE enabled each delegate to vote anonymously with just a button press, which was instantly counted and results were broadcast onscreen. This made each vote not only faster, but far more accurate as well. With the meeting being a resounding success, The Northeastern Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists are continuing the collective shift among religious organizations to embrace electronic voting, ensuring speed, accuracy and anonymity for their meetings in 2026 and beyond.
