In the wake of the excruciatingly lengthy voting process for two of the issues at the December 2 Special Town Meeting, the Select Board will distribute general information on the process in advance of a public forum to gauge the town’s appetite for changes.
The time-consuming task of counting paper ballots for the community center and Housing Choice Act issues led several residents afterwards to suggest using electronic “clickers” to vote. Many also said that the many hours required for all presentations, discussion, and voting at all Town Meetings are excessive and unfair to those who can’t come in person for the entire meeting.
Part of the public education process is explaining what Lincolnites alone can and cannot do. Among the “cannots”: changing Lincoln’s Town Meeting rules to allow remote voting, or to have the votes happen at different times than the presentations and public comment period. Both of those prohibitions are based on state law and would require an act of the legislature to change.
“It’s never going to be “walk in, vote, walk out,” Select Board member Kim Bodnar observed at the board’s December 18 meeting, which was also attended by Town Moderator Sarah Cannon Holden.
The separate issue of speeding along the voting is more feasible. A number of towns distribute electronic clickers to Town Meeting attendees so votes can be recorded and tallied in very little time. However, that would mean that voting would be anonymous rather than public, where people can see how their fellow residents are voting when they stand up or raise a hand.
“Even something as simple as that turns into a multifaceted discussion,” board member Jim Hutchinson said. He also noted that there is no money in the current fiscal year’s budget to purchase clickers in time for the March 2024 Annual Town Meeting. “We’re not actually going to need them in March,” since the votes will all be simple yes-or-no, he added.
The biggest problem on December 2 was the time it took to tally the votes on the community center and Housing Choice Act, because they involved several rounds of multiple-choice voting via paper ballot. The HCA vote was originally going to be on a single option formulated by the Housing Choice Act Working group, but a late-breaking demand for other options that would not concentrate multifamily housing in the South Lincoln area led to expansion of the vote.
“We do things differently from other towns. It’s very unusual to give voters multiple choices,” Hutchinson noted. Lincoln first used the method at a Special Town Meeting in June 2018 to select a design option for the school project. In discussions with colleagues from other towns, Town Administrator Tim Higgins said Lincoln seems to be unique in this respect. “It’s unheard of to add that step to the process,” he said.
Higgins noted that Lincoln has made efforts over the years to streamline Town Meetings, including expanding use of the consent calendar (where several noncontroversial items are voted on as a bloc if nobody objects), having presentations online and recorded in advance of Town Meetings, tightening up the town budget presentation, creating the State of the Town meeting about 20 years ago, and even talking about moving Town Meeting to two or weeknights.
A 2015 report by the Town Meeting Advisory Committee in Weston contained many of the same recommendations that Lincoln has adopted in recent year, Higgins said. That committee also noted that the town had approved a change in guidelines for running Town Meetings, switching from Robert’s Rules of Order (first published in 1876) to Town Meeting Time: A Handbook of Parliamentary Law, a handbook of parliamentary law called that focuses especially on the operation of town meetings by the Massachusetts Moderators Association (published in 1962 and revised twice since then).
To get a better sense of the town on major issues, conducting official online polls using technology to make sure voters are qualified and vote only once is another option to explore, Hutchinson said. But no decisions can be made until officials get a broader sense of what the majority would like to see from a public forum or committee.
Alongside with the complaints about the recent vote were other expressions of support for the current format, imperfect though it may be, the board noted. “We want to hear whether residents want Town Meeting changed or not,” Bodnar said.
“The people who are objecting to something are often louder than those who are satisfied with things,” Holden said.