Equity vs. tradition: The double-edged sword of modernizing town meetings
New England towns’ annual legislation days face pressure from secret balloting — and the internet.
By Elise Young
When the pandemic shut down the town meetings that govern New England municipalities, residents improvised with outdoor gatherings, Web streams and mailed ballots. Some of those temporary workarounds, though, have potential to become permanent — endangering almost 400 years of pure democratic tradition, critics say.
Once-a-year town meetings, in which residents vote directly on matters from multimillion-dollar budgets to fence-height restrictions, have their roots in ancient Greece and Rome. The U.S. version, which dates to the early 17th century, remains a way of life for more than 1,000 towns, mostly in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Historically, town meetings centered on neighbor-on-neighbor debate followed by voting. It was a simple enough task in small rural communities. But Colonial settlers never counted on two-career households, the demands of child care, volunteer commitments and so many other modern-day distractions that leave residents not so free for a whole day — sometimes more — of local lawmaking.
In recent decades, some towns have switched to a council system, with officials elected to represent voters’ interests. Even among communities that stuck with town meetings, some scrapped mandatory in-person voting, allowing residents — even if they didn’t attend — to make their choices after hours by what is known as the Australian ballot, the secret slip-of-paper-in-a-shoebox method familiar to anyone who has voted for class president.
The drive to consider that change has only accelerated since the pandemic, when some governors allowed town meetings to go virtual, with the option of ballot-box voting — steps that ordinarily require local approval. This year alone in the Green Mountain State, 18 towns considered adopting the Australian ballot, according to the Vermont League of Cities & Towns, a research and lobbying group.
“You lose one of the oldest forms of democracy — the role of citizens to be directly engaged,” Richard Watts, who researches town meetings as director of the University of Vermont’s Center for Research on Vermont, said of the shifts from tradition. “You dilute democracy.”
At the same time, data show that such voting drives higher participation rates, as those who don’t attend annual meetings can still make their choices count. And the Australian ballot has the support of the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights, which in a February letter to 175 towns said it was an issue of equity.
“Unfortunately, for too long, Town Meeting Day has not provided opportunity for equal representation including for people with disabilities, older Vermonters, those without access to transportation, and people who are unable to obtain childcare or time off from work,” the coalition wrote in a February letter to 175 towns. The pandemic, it said, provided an opportunity to tweak the town meeting format “so that anyone could vote.”
In Danville, Vermont, home to roughly 2,300 people, town and school budgets are approved by Australian ballot, but other business is decided at town meetings. In May, residents voted 102–26 to maintain the meeting format rather than switch to all secret balloting.
In the background, volunteers are weighing how to engage more people in civic activities in general, and town meetings in particular.
“Some people feel left out because we don’t have a presence on social media,” Alison Low, 61, a member of the town selectboard, or supervisory committee. With the positives of social media, though, can come the negatives, she said: “a lot of lies, rhetoric, inflammatory statements.”
In New Hampshire, residents since 1995 have had the option of sticking to the one-day town meeting, or dividing it into two sessions, one to learn about the issues and the other for voting. While about one-third of town-meeting communities have opted for the split days, advocates in recent years have had a tough time persuading more to choose that system. Since 2020, at least six towns have fended off attempts to alter the traditional format.
While the split town meeting offers convenience, it comes at a cost of civic engagement, according to 85-year-old Bob Davison of Plainfield, New Hampshire, who was his town’s meeting moderator for 31 years. In the 1990s, he recalled, residents were asked whether the school system should offer health insurance to domestic partners, at a time when such benefits were extremely rare. For weeks prior to the town meeting, some critics equated the matter to support for gay lifestyles, which they considered immoral and not worthy of taxpayer support, Davison recalled.
“It came up for vote and I knew it was going to be hot, so I had people line up and get the microphone for three minutes,” Davison said in an interview. “About the third person to talk was this big, muscular guy. I had never seen him before. He looked at that audience and paused for four to five seconds and he said, ‘I’m a gay man. And I would never want to discriminate against your children.’” The audience cheered for him, Davison said, and the overwhelming majority voted yes.
“Had it been just you walk in and get a ballot and check off yes or no, it never would have passed with that kind of margin,” he said.
While town meetings typically operate in small communities, larger municipalities also make it work, with some modifications.
Ashland, Massachusetts, home to about 36,500 people, met this year on May 1–2 to consider 41 articles, or pieces of business. On the first night, 454 registered voters were present, with 55 fewer coming the next night. Among the items approved were a fireworks display, a $2.5 million landfill expenditure, a solar installation at a public school and the $223.8 million municipal budget.
In 2016, Ashland set out to increase town meeting participation in part by determining barriers to attendance. The findings led to free childcare during the meeting, which boosted the crowd by 60%, or 400 people. At the same time, the average age of attendees dropped to 48 from 64, for a broader swath of perspectives.
Dozens of Massachusetts towns, eager to streamline meetings, have replaced hand, voice and paper voting with handheld electronic clickers. One device provider, Meridia Interactive Solutions, says the system counts choices instantly and accurately, precluding the need for recounts that can take hours. Votes remain anonymous, giving confidence to participants making an unpopular choice, according to Meridia’s website.
“When you adopt the clickers, it says to the townspeople, ‘I respect your time.’ We can speed up the process by asking for yeses or nos and 20 seconds later, moving on,” said Ned Perry, a retired 76-year-old civil-rights attorney from Concord, Massachusetts, who served as town moderator for a decade. In future years, he expects such technology to expand to participants at home watching a live stream.
The downside, he said, is “you lose the face-to-face interaction.”
Watts, the University of Vermont researcher, said he’s all for expanding participation, but not via absentee balloting. He recalled attending town meetings as a youth, with lunches of soup and warm home-baked bread in a room set aside for children as adults took care of business. In that atmosphere, he said, townspeople learned what Frank Bryan, a retired UVM professor, called “forced civility” — with lasting effects that go well beyond one day a year.
“There’s something about having to disagree with someone right in front of them,” Watts said. “It’s the same person you’re going to see at the grocery store or the school.”
Elise Young is a New Jersey-based freelance journalist. In the past she was a national reporter for Bloomberg News and a senior writer for The (Bergen) Record.
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