After a lively debate, clickers get Town Meeting test drive

As residents streamed into Acton-Carlisle High School for Town Meeting on Monday night, they passed the usual check-in tables. 

But this year, they received something new: a slim plastic device with a few numbered buttons. The “clickers” were making their debut. 

(Almost) no more raising colored paper slips to vote or waiting for headcounts. Just a quick tap: 1 for yes and 2 for no.

Longtime election worker Stephan Bader stood behind the check-in table, handing out the new clickers with a polite smile.

He wasn’t sold, though.

“What is being sacrificed in the name of convenience?” he asked. 

Bader said the shift to clickers struck him as having parallels to an Amazon delivery: efficient, maybe even preferable, but not without a cost. With faster shipping, he said, comes more packaging, more trucks, and more emissions. 

With clickers, he said, the tradeoff is transparency: “This is a legislative body. If the legislators on Beacon Hill stopped telling us how they voted, we would have a problem with it,” Bader said. 

The Town Meeting Study Committee recommended clickers after a survey found residents wanted more privacy while voting. The clickers for this year’s meeting, rented from the company Meridia, cost the town $15,400. 

A lengthy debate

After a few practice votes on lighthearted topics such as naming Acton’s official town dog and preferred James Bond actor, the focus turned to the clickers themselves. 

For more than 30 minutes, residents debated the new system. Some raised concerns about accuracy and reliability. Others asked whether votes were truly private or if individual devices could be linked back to voters.

Town Meeting participant Amryn Frisch spoke in favor of their use. 

“I moved to Acton 10 years ago, and this is my first Town Meeting. I would not have come if there weren’t the clickers,” she said, adding that she wasn’t comfortable with the paper ballots and suspected other young voters like her felt the same. 

Ellie Garvey, another Town Meeting attendee, also spoke in support of the clickers. She saw the change as a worthwhile experiment.

“People were jumping up before we had even tried them,” Garvey told The Bridge. “That was my thing. Why wouldn’t we want to test them out?”

Garvey said she trusted the study committee that recommended the system and saw no harm in a test drive: “Sometimes, you gotta give something new a shot,” she said.

In the end, voters agreed. The meeting approved using the clickers.

After her first experience with them, Garvey said she was convinced of their value, though she also saw room for improvement, such as quickening the process for the election workers she saw diligently counting hundreds of clickers after the meeting.

Resident David Allen, a vocal longtime skeptic of clickers, said they seemed to extend voting time “a good bit more than the traditional paper slips.” He also said his clicker “failed to register one of my votes, confirmed by the vendor representative. Worrisome.”

‘Growing pains’

After Town Meeting wrapped up on Monday night, staff gathered near the exits, ready with bins and checklists. As residents filed out, they dropped their clickers back into the containers. 

Behind the check-in tables, workers carefully counted each device, lining them up by number. Any that went missing were to be deactivated remotely. But by the end of the night, every clicker had been accounted for and returned, Elections and Census Manager Justine Donovan reported. 

Donovan, who headed the clicker count, said that day one had “growing pains,” such as having to sort clickers on the fly and manually add lanyards to each one. But she was happy with the system they had created. 

“It’s only going to get smoother,” Donovan said. “With each time they are used, we will get better.”