A private vote at town meeting requires a motion and a majority vote by town meeting.  The process of voting privately has only occurred at Wayland Town Meeting 2 times in the past 30 years.  So one might think that Waylanders do NOT want to vote in private at town meeting.

Think again.

The process of the private vote is very time consuming. 

Lets imagine an audience of 1,000 participants.  The town clerk always brings sufficient paper ballots  to accomplish this just in case town meeting wishes to invoke this legal choice.  The paper ballot is simple, it is  a small piece of paper with a center line perforation and a YES and NO printed on each side of the perforation which divides the paper in half. (YES_NO)

First the paper ballots must be handed out.  One to each voter and this must be done carefully.  Nobody can get more than one ballot and every registered and legal voter must get one.  How long would this take?  Lets budget 1 hr for 1,000 people.

Next, the 1,000 people would have to stand in line in front of a pair of boxes at the front of the town meeting.  Each person would tear the ballot in half and deposit the vote into the vote box and the discard into the discard box.  How long would this take?  At 5 seconds per person (and that may be kind) thats 5,000 seconds or approaching 1.4 hrs.

Next, the votes must be counted.  How long?  Another hour?

The total process would take hours for 1,000 people.

Why do you think that we have only had 2 private votes in 30 years?

Now suppose we could have a private vote in 60 seconds with computer precision and security?

This is a question that is best answered for yourself but after doing that you might project your answer to other people.

We live in a small town.  We know each other, go to soccer games, our children play together, we socialize, we see each other at the store and we are our neighbors.  We may belong to a group who has a cause and our social group may want all of us to vote a particular way.  Suppose we don’t want to vote that way?  If we don’t we may risk our social perceptions, we may risk even more.  There maybe a fear in not going along with the group.  Some of us maybe in this situation.

We go to the polls and we have complete privacy.  If we are asked how we voted at the polls we could say it is none of your business, we could tell the truth or not.  But whatever happens, we ultimately have our privacy at the polls.

We do not have our privacy at town meeting unless we want to wait for hours in a process which is almost never used.

In every legitimate democracy in the world, people vote at the polls in private.  Why is privacy given to us at the polls?  It Is because our system of democracy appreciates the ability for each and every one of us to make a voting decision with regard to coercion or social pressure.

I think people appreciate privacy in voting and I think they would appreciate that privacy afforded to all of the places we vote and that includes town meeting.

Electronic keypad voting will give us this voting privacy.

In modern times it does, it is just very time consuming and therefore, very rarely used.

But in history:  In 1638 the male landowners of Sudbury gathered (all 50 of them?) at a local tavern or barn or meeting place that they constructed and they ran the town of Puritan settlers.

These people were in charge, they were vocal and they must have had little problem in debating and voting out in the open.  There were many people like that then and even today we have people like that.  But there are many people who are not like that and want their privacy and do not want others to see how they vote.  Nothing is wrong with that at all.

Without the readily available technology and with such a cumbersome system of getting privacy, our 370 year old system of town meeting voting evolved to what we have now.  A system where we vote in clear sight of each other.  When we step into town meeting we go from 2010 to 1638.

Private voting is legal, we can have it and the technology is now available to do it on a massive scale.

It Is time to move our 1638 tradition and move it into the 21st century.

But we can still keep town meeting and not ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’.  We can still have a town meeting where we attend, debate, act as a legislature (which is it and which we are when we attend) but add the element of privacy. 

This is very exciting and a very exciting time we live in to be able to accomplish this.

That seems to be the prevailing opinion but I think there is more to this than meets the eye.

Clearly there are those who go to town meeting for a specific reason to vote a particular way on a particular article.  That is their right.

It Is also just as possible that there are people who go to town meeting with somebody else’s mind made up.  That is, they feel are expected to attend and they feel they are expected to vote a particular way.  Wayland has well-organized and well-connected political action groups.   There is no secret about this.

I suspect that some of these people attend because they are expected to attend but they vote a particular way because they are being watched.  And, make no mistake about it, they are.

If you give those people handheld keypad voting devices, with the privacy that these devices bestow, you might just get the TRUE vote from those people.  Take the coercion out of the process and you will get the true vote every time.

I think that minds being made up in advance can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The made up part may be forced and by injecting privacy, the made up may disappear and debate and logic will prevail.

The debate plus the arguments of the logic behind the debate is what the essence of town meeting is all about. Privacy levels the playing field.

I also believe that more people would attend town meeting because they would know that they could vote privately and they would no longer feel intimidated.  The pressure would be reduced for those who stay away for these reasons.

Electronic Keypad Voting has the potential to generate voting without peer pressure and it has the ability to increase town meeting participation.

Remember, each question voted upon hangs on potentially ONE VOTE.  There is always a line in the sand, be it 50% or 2/3rds. 

If you change the numerical vote then you can change the voting result for the town meeting.