At a special Town Meeting last fall to consider whether to adopt Australian balloting for part of his town’s annual business, Royalton resident Charlie Bascom offered a dire word of caution.
“This article will kill Town Meeting,” Bascom said.
He was among the many skeptics at the meeting, at which attendees voted, 57-49, to put off the discussion until March, when a full Town Meeting could decide the question.
If they approve on March 3, Royalton voters would thereafter decide public questions — articles that ask for a public decision on actions other than spending — by Australian ballot, secret balloting at polls open most of the day. The Selectboard advanced the proposal and considers it a trial run. If it passes and residents believe it works, the board is likely to consider asking the town to decide more articles, including the budget and other spending decisions, by Australian ballot.
The Selectboard views the move to Australian ballot as a way to enfranchise more of the town’s 2,300 registered voters. But Bascom’s vehement opposition, a view he still holds and which others in town share, suggests that there are other values at stake besides access to the ballot box. Voters who have come to cherish the annual meeting fear the loss of an opportunity to discuss and decide the issues of the day face-to-face with their neighbors.
This debate plays out regularly in the Twin States, where towns are adapting to changing work and settlement patterns that aren’t always easy to reconcile with the deliberate debate of a form of government with roots in the 18th century.
“I do understand that we need more people participating,” Bascom said last week. But the meeting is vital.
“I think people who care about the health of their community can take four hours” to attend, he said.
Town Meeting has been around since before Vermont and New Hampshire were founded, and it remains the fundamental form of government in both states. It carried on largely unaltered for two centuries.
The Vermont Legislature began to enable changes to the form of Town Meeting in the 1970s, when it allowed towns to adopt Australian ballot for the election of town officers, budgets and public questions. Over time, towns have migrated to the Australian ballot, said Will Senning, director of elections at the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office.
“It’s been a slow transition,” he said in a phone interview.
New Hampshire enabled changes of its own in 1995, allowing a Town Meeting format known as SB2, which breaks up the meeting into a deliberative floor session followed days later by Australian balloting. Many towns have adopted SB2 for both town and school district meetings.
Changes to Town Meeting have moved slowly in Royalton. The town started choosing its officials by Australian ballot long enough ago that no one quite remembers when. The aim, said former longtime Selectman John Dumville, was to make it easier for people to know who was running earlier in the process so they could get their messages out. In towns that elect officials from the floor, many people don’t know who’s running until the meeting gets going.
Royalton has made other voting changes over the years. Years ago, it moved its school district meeting to the night before the Town Meeting, when more parents would be able to attend, Dumville said.
Selectboard members said the plan to extend Australian ballot to public questions cropped up both on the board and in the community.
“I don’t know where it germinated,” Tim Dreisbach, the board’s vice chairman, said in an interview.
“It seems to me the argument in favor of it is very simple,” he added. “An Australian ballot enfranchises voters who are unable to attend in person due to work, or other commitments or physical impediments. Further, it’s unfair to deny those people a voice, and it is disrespectful to presume that someone taking the time to fill out a paper ballot is an uninformed voter.”
Turnout in Royalton is higher for Australian ballot voting than for the floor meeting, though it’s worth noting that the ballot carries the names of both town and school district officers, while the floor meeting typically addresses the town budget.
Records on file at the Town Clerk’s Office show that last year 135 voters attended the floor meeting and 348 voters cast Australian ballots, 6% and 15%, respectively, of the town’s checklist of 2,318 voters.
Those figures hold pretty steady. In 2016, 766 voters cast ballots, thanks to the presidential primary, and 198 attended the floor meeting, 38% and 10%, respectively, of the checklist of 1,986 names.
“I just feel like we need to find ways to include more voters,” Selectboard Chairwoman Sandy Conrad said in a phone interview. “I feel like the people who come to Town Meeting are privileged people who have the day off,” she added.
Town Meeting was developed when New England was an agrarian culture of small farms, and then of even smaller farms, as residents migrated to industrializing urban centers or to richer farmland in the Midwest. Now, more Upper Valley residents are likely to commute to jobs and can’t take a day off from work. Nearly everyone contacted for this story acknowledged that life isn’t structured the way it used to be.
Towns tend to consider changing their annual meetings when they reach a certain size, said Susan Clark, who co-authored All Those in Favor: Rediscovering the Secrets of Town Meeting and Community with University of Vermont political science professor Frank Bryan, who’s now retired. An attendance of 135 seems substantial in a town with 700 voters, but much less so in a town of 2,000.
“In a small town, your presence counts for more,” she said in a phone interview.
Bryan sent his students out to study Town Meetings in detail for 30 years. Clark and Bryan’s book came out in 2005 and was reissued with new material in 2015. Their research found that the “reasons people attend or don’t attend don’t have anything to do with any systemic exclusion,” said Clark, who is also the moderator in her hometown of Middlesex, Vt. There’s no socioeconomic relationship to Town Meeting attendance, either, she said.
“What the research shows is that there is not a bias,” she said.
In their writings, Bryan and Clark have suggested that as a town grows and the percentage of voter turnout declines, it would be better off moving to a representative town meeting, where precincts of a town elect representatives to vote at the meeting. So far, Clark said, only Brattleboro has adopted that form of meeting, which is more common in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
In Royalton, another argument has centered around losing the meeting’s power to discuss, amend, refine, and vote up or down all in one go. Dreisbach said Australian balloting can be preceded by an informational meeting, but Clark noted that, “basically, voters know the difference,” and will turn out in even smaller numbers when a meeting offers them no authority to move and change articles.
“The reality is, if there’s no power, frankly, people have better things to do,” Clark said. She referred to the power of the meeting as a “magic gemstone” that draws people to it.
Turnout is likely to be driven by the kinds of issues the meeting takes up. Outside of presidential primaries, Royalton’s biggest recent Australian ballot turnout was in 2014, when there were contested elections for town clerk, Selectboard and School Board. Turnout for the floor meeting saw a slight bump, too, with 162, or 8% of the town’s checklist of 2,027 voters, in attendance.
Dumville, who’s running against Conrad, and Bascom both said they’d like to see the town move its business meeting to Saturday, when more people are likely to be able to attend. The timing of the school meeting is now out of the town’s hands, to a degree, since Royalton and Bethel formed a union school district two years ago.
The attention on Town Meeting is welcome, but now that people are talking about solutions, it’s hard to know how the talks will end. In Middlesex, Clark chairs a standing Town Meeting Solutions Committee that constantly monitors the state of the meeting and how residents interact with it.
The committee formed about 15 years ago, when a proposal came up to convert the meeting to Australian ballot. Voters opted against it, except for election to town offices, but have come up with a variety of ways to enhance participation.
It’s held in the evening. Child care is available and there’s a meal. The town sends a letter to new voters about how to participate in town government, and a new voter, often an 18-year-old, leads a civil invocation at the start of Town Meeting. Since 2008, Middlesex also has offered remote participation in Town Meeting, even to the point of loaning a computer to anyone who wants to listen, speak and vote from home.
“We really wanted to be sure we weren’t leaving people out,” Clark said.
Even so, she reiterated that low turnout tends not to be about access but about issues. Sometimes a town will see a spike in attendance when something that captures public attention comes up. Royalton needn’t look farther than Bethel, which held packed Town Meetings in the years immediately after Tropical Storm Irene, when residents got together to elect new leadership and develop other initiatives to move the town forward after the devastating floods of August 2011.
“That tells us,” Clark said, speaking generally, “that (for) these communities, Town Meeting is waiting for them.”
In a subsequent book, Slow Democracy, Clark and co-author Woden Teachout (a Norwich native) found that, while Vermonters wonder whether Town Meeting is antiquated, residents elsewhere are finding that the facelessness of the ballot box isn’t a be-all, end-all. Parts of Chicago are conducting “participatory budgeting,” she said. “It looks a lot like Town Meeting.”
Whereas Vermont and New Hampshire already have the most direct form of democracy, other places are seeking it out, she said.
“People are trying to fix ballot box voting by adding a Town Meeting component.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
