Wayland began electronic voting at Town Meetings in 2011, with the objectives of improving voting speed and accuracy, and of ensuring that citizens could cast their votes in private without fear of reprisals from others. Then-Moderator Peter Gossels established the Electronic Voting Implementation Subcommittee (ELVIS) to ensure the effective use of electronic voting at Annual and Special Town Meetings, and to support Wayland’s periodic selection of an electronic voting service provider.

Remote Participation

From the beginning, much of what ELVIS has heard from Waylanders has boiled down to “We can shop from home and we can bank from home, why can’t we participate in Town Meetings from home?” Some don’t wish to be away from their children on school nights, or must rise early for work the following morning, or have commitments on weekends. Some have disabilities that prevent them from hearing the proceedings, or driving at night.

With Moderator Dennis Berry’s encouragement, ELVIS began to investigate and solve the technical impediments to remote participation in Wayland Town Meetings:

1. Making Remote Participation simple enough for every Waylander to use.
   
2. Immediately informing the Moderator if a significant fraction of remote participants have been disconnected – e.g. by a power failure, or an internet outage, or a denial-of-service attack.
3. Securely casting votes over the internet and cellular networks.
4. Detecting and deterring one person from voting for another (proxy voting)

Making Remote Participation Legal

Over several years, ELVIS members developed solutions to each of the above impediments. That left one non-technical impediment: how to institute remote participation in Open Town Meetings (such as Wayland’s) given that Massachusetts law requires in-person voting at such Town Meetings.

On January 11, 2021, Wayland’s Select Board approved the development of a Warrant Article authorizing the Select Board to petition the Massachusetts Legislature to legalize remote participation in Open Town Meetings. Dave Watkins (Select Board liaison to ELVIS) led the creation of this Article, that when presented to Annual Town Meeting on May 15, 2021 passed by a vote of 195 to 50. On May 24, 2021 the Select Board accepted the Town Administrator’s recommendation that KP Law – Wayland’s Town Counsel – be engaged to draft the necessary legislation.

Select Board Member Watkins immediately developed a first draft of a proposed bill, but he and Select Board Member Tom Fay were not granted access to Town Counsel on this matter until February 10, 2022 – a delay of nearly nine months. Three months later on May 20, 2022, KP Law’s Managing Attorney, who has experience developing such legislation, produced her own draft bill with a provision that would create a committee reporting to the Select Board to oversee the testing and deployment of remote participation – assuring State Legislators that ELVIS could not act unilaterally. She also recommended that Wayland introduce its State Representatives Carmine Gentile and Alice Peisch to ELVIS’ proposed solutions to the technical impediments, and ask them to review the draft bill.

Presentations to Representative Peisch’s staff on May 31, 2022 and to Representative Gentile and his staff on June 10, 2022 both went well. On June 27, 2022, realizing that the citizens of Wayland had been waiting for more than 13 months to move this process forward, Representative Gentile submitted the draft bill to the Legislature on his own initiative:

https://trackbill.com/bill/massachusetts-house-docket-5216-an-act-authorizing-remote-participation-at-town-meetings-in-the-town-of-wayland/2265166/

Even though the bill’s introduction came late in the legislative year, progress was faster than expected. It was approved by the Elections Committee and reached the “House Committee on Bills in the Third Reading” – the final gate before a bill is sent to the House floor for a vote. Unfortunately, the Legislature’s 2022 session ended before our bill was sent to the House.

Select Board Action

During preparations for a meeting with the Select Board to decide how to proceed, Representative Gentile asserted that resubmitting our bill with no changes would optimize its prospects for rapid passage this year – a point he repeated to the Select Board when it took up this topic on January 17 2023. However, two Select Board members argued for revising the bill. One characterized the desired changes as “clarifying, reorganization to put like thoughts together”. Another expressed discomfort with “codifying a committee in state law”. Despite being advised that there would be a future opportunity to submit a modified bill after Wayland had implemented and tested remote participation, the Select Board voted to remove the sections of the bill that define the committee recommended by Town Counsel; they will resubmit the bill effectively as first drafted in May 2021 – thereby risking yet another significant delay in gaining legislative approval. Audio and video from the “remote participation” agenda item of this Select Board meeting begins one hour and 24 minutes into this WayCAM recording:

Next Steps

Since January 2021, members of ELVIS working with Select Board Members Watkins and Fay have presented our proposed approach to remote participation in Open Town Meeting to Wayland residents, Wayland’s Town Counsel, personnel from 13 Massachusetts towns, 3 State Representatives, 2 State Senators, and an Assistant Attorney General. Each of these presentations was received enthusiastically. Feedback from these engagements led ELVIS to abandon the initially considered method of facial recognition technology as a means of detecting proxy voting, relying instead on real time interaction with Wayland staff or volunteers under the control of the Moderator. Realtime transcription was added, along with the ability for all participants to view the queue of remote participants waiting to speak.

At an ELVIS meeting on January 26, 2023, its members voted unanimously to accept a Requirements Document developed from these presentations. If 

1. remote participation in Open Town Meeting is approved by the State Legislature
   
2. the number of Massachusetts Towns that express interest in remote participation is sufficient to induce one or more electronic voting service providers to develop software that satisfies the requirements
   
3. the Select Board directs our Town Manager to issue a Remote Participation Request for Proposals

then ELVIS stands ready to assess the technical component of those Proposals and, ultimately, to facilitate the effective use of remote participation at Wayland Town Meetings.

Dave Bernstein, Chair ELVIS