You may have noticed that we haven’t been posting much since December. It’s not because we had nothing to talk about, but because we were busy helping the democratic process of voting at our clients’ meetings.
The last spring town meeting season in New England was incredible and we can’t wait until the fall season starts in a few weeks! We personally attended over 20 open town meetings, and dozens of towns handled their own voting with TownVOTE as they do every year. Westford had a particularly hard time this year, because they had to postpone their town meeting twice due to extraordinary attendance. They finally held their “override” vote on a football field at Westford Academy with around 2,000 people in attendance.
Other towns, like Marblehead and Hull successfully implemented a multi-room, or even a multi-building, semi-permanent installation of the voting system, so that they can easily accommodate the voters in multiple locations.
Meridia attended two MA Town Clerk Association conventions, and one Technology Conference of Maine Municipal Association in Augusta this May, where we talked about the benefits of the voting system to some potential clients and showed them how they can save time at their town meetings and bring more people into the democratic process.
As spring town meeting season comes to a close, we’re happy to announce that over 70 towns in New England are now using TownVOTE along with over 36,000 keypads in use!
Since 2021, the number of towns implementing Meridia’s TownVOTE meeting voting system has increased steadily to more than double that of three years ago. We’re ecstatic to welcome each of these newcomers to the list – Littleton, Southborough, Northborough, Brookfield, Marblehead, Otis, Norwood, Sheffield, Sandwich, North Brookfield, and more than a dozen more that are weighing their decision to come onboard before the 2024 Fall Town Meeting season.
We’ve been very active in the world of representative city and town meetings, as well. Like in Greenwich a year ago, the City of Stamford just adopted TownVOTE for their hybrid representative meetings (called Board of Directors) in April. Here’s a video of them using the system (around 3:30 timestamp)
Meridia voting system enables representatives both in the room and at home to vote together seamlessly. We look forward to continuing to work with Stamford and Greenwich as they give us valuable feedback to improve the workflow and features, such as online participant indicators, easier participant login experience, a dedicated Apple app, and seamless reporting.
Our work didn’t stop there. We are now the official voting system of ALL the Committees in the U.S. House of Representatives, with over 1,200 keypads in use there. According to their Committee Clerks, they’re saving hours of valuable time by using a streamlined TownVOTE Participant Grid voting experience instead of a slow, voice vote counting during a roll call vote.
