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! We’ll continue to have our hands full in May and June as we continue to provide electronic voting solutions for all of our clients’ meetings, but until then, here are some notable facts about the Spring 2025 town meeting season.
With twenty-two events completed since March and many more coming up, Spring 2025 has been one of our busiest seasons ever for New England town meetings. Many of the meetings, such as those conducted by Hamilton, Marblehead, and Wenham, drew large crowds due to high-profile decisions related to school budgeting, renovations, and even building an entire new school. Some meetings required multiple nights to complete, which could largely be attributed to voting on the controversial MBTA Section 3A zoning Act, which aims to amend Eastern Massachusetts’ zoning in relation to multi-family housing. In the upcoming weeks, we will continue to provide electronic voting to 14 more towns in Massachusetts, with some requesting on-site support and some conducting their meetings independently.
We smashed our record for the biggest town meeting we’ve ever been involved in, with the Town of Marblehead peaking at over 1,700 voters. Previously, our largest meeting at Westwood, MA drew around 1,300 voters; a substantial increase! Despite the huge crowd, everybody was able to cast their vote in less than two minutes, drastically cutting down the amount of time needed to manually count votes. The meeting was critical for the town as multiple high-profile issues were debated and voted on- including the MBTA Section 3A zoning act which narrowly passed by a vote of 951 to 759. In total, over 2,000 people attended the meeting over the course of three days, convening at the high school gym.
Despite the stress of a town meeting, Amanda Cannon, the Town Clerk at Lancaster, MA shared her positive experience with us: “Everything went great! And I got so many compliments on the clickers (which is funny cause we’ve been using them for years!) and people were so happy with how fast they made things! We had 20 total [Warrant articles], but it only took hour and 15 minutes to get through all of them! It was record-setting!”
