Time To Broaden Town Meeting Participation With Remote Access

To the editor: Over the past 400 years, participation in Massachusetts Open Town Meetings — like Nantucket’s — has expanded from a narrow circle of property‑owning men to all of a town’s registered voters. It is time to broaden that participation again, to include voters whom the current requirement for physical presence keeps out: those with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities, parents who will not leave their children on school nights, and voters who must travel for work. In many towns, fewer than 5 percent of registered voters are able to take part in their Open Town Meetings. When so many voices are excluded, frustration grows — and with it, pressure to replace Open Town Meeting with less democratic forms of government.

Modern technology can now support full remote participation in Open Town Meeting: listening, speaking, and deliberating, as well as voting. Most remote participants would use their own smartphones or tablets to connect via a web browser — with no special software installation required. Because every Town Meeting vote is resolved in real time, each remote participant can see and verify their own vote before it is declared final. Random audio‑video re‑check‑ins throughout each session, combined with stiff penalties for voting fraud, will deter the impersonation of one voter by another. Moderators would be provided with tools designed to manage Town Meetings with larger numbers of participants than most venues can accommodate. A full technical description of our proposed approach is available here.

Fifteen years ago, Wayland’s Electronic Voting Implementation Subcommittee (ELVIS) introduced the use of wireless electronic handsets — “clickers” — to count Town Meeting votes rapidly, accurately, and privately. Today, more than 70 Massachusetts towns use this technology. We can follow the same careful path of testing, refinement, and incremental rollout to develop and prove the software required for remote participation, in partnership with a competent development organization attracted by the opportunity. We do not need new public funding to do this work. What we need is for the Massachusetts Legislature to authorize a five‑town Remote Participation Pilot Program that can demonstrate that all Open Town Meeting towns should have the option to employ remote participation.

You can help. Please contact your legislators and urge them to support this pilot program, so that Open Town Meeting can once again live up to its name.

Dave Bernstein, Chair ELVIS