May 25, 2019
By Mickey Friedman
Ten employees of Amalgamated Gizmo jointly purchase a lottery ticket. Which turns out to be a winning ticket worth a million dollars. The ten winners meet at Guiseppi’s Meatballs & More to decide how to spend the money. What if I told you only one of them, Archie Appleton, made the decision? And he decided to buy a million dollar speedboat even though they live a thousand miles from the ocean.
One in ten. That’s how important decisions are made in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, our used to be Best Small Town in America.
When I lived in Monterey, Town Meeting began as a conversation and then moved to decision-making. Neighbors, mostly friends, figured out what to do, how much to spend. Small town New England democracy works when there is a sense of a mostly shared experience. It’s an old- fashioned way of doing things. Democracy. Then.
A process, in my opinion, that no longer works in larger places. Where Town Meeting often feels like a competition, and winning seems to happen more than listening and compromise. More and more, these are the days of self-righteousness, where the easiest thing in the world is to get on social media and dismiss someone else’s opinion, diminish those who disagree, declare that others just don’t understand, or just don’t care.
I’ve stopped going to Great Barrington’s Town Meeting. It’s not really my idea of community decision-making. Because it’s pretty much a self-selecting process. The most convinced, the most committed, the loudest are there. Which is, of course, their right.
But in 2019, only 468 voted on the school and Town budget on Monday night and only 215 voted on Tuesday to uphold the ban on single use plastic bottles. A small percentage of townspeople deciding how to spend our money, set zoning policy, and determine a whole bunch of other important things that affect our lives. About one in ten.
Some think that’s the way it ought to be. Leave the decision-making to those who care the most. The most informed. Because decision-making ought to be earned.
These days I’m ready for something new. A new democracy. I want to find a way to include more of us in the decision-making process.
Many of my friends don’t attend Town Meeting. One who does, brings sangria. How about your friends, neighbors and co-workers? Do they go to Town Meeting? Do they feel that anyone cares what they think about pot stores, downtown redevelopment, plastic bags and water bottles, or how much to spend on a new school?
Who are those who don’t attend? Maybe the old or poor without cars, or those who don’t like driving at night or staying up past nine. The disabled who don’t want to impose on their friends. The ill who can’t get out of bed. The fathers and mothers who don’t want to leave home on a school night. Those single parents with an infant or young kid at home. Those who have to get up at dawn to go to work.
Life is so very different today than it was only years ago. It’s possible to re-imagine democracy in a way that works for just about everyone. For those able and willing, even anxious, to attend Town Meeting, great, there’s absolutely no reason to end that tradition.
But there’s a way, using modern technology, to extend and expand the discussion and the votes an additional week and allow for online and telephone voting. Summarize and post the positions expressed during Town Meeting so these new voters can take advantage of what other voters have said. Give each voter a unique ID and password with which they can either vote at Town Meeting or using their home computers or computers at work. Even their smart phones. Let’s raise a little money and add simple computerized voting kiosks at strategic locations around town: our libraries, the Community Health Program, Big Y, Price Chopper, the Co-op, Guidos, the Community Center and Senior Center, for example.
There are towns in Ontario, Canada and New York State that take advantage of online voting. Yes, there have sometimes been problems, but the systems get better and better. Most importantly, they increase participation in a significant way. According to Nicole Goodman, an assistant professor of political science at Brock University and the lead researcher for two online voting studies, “Online voting has exploded in certain communities across the country, with the City of Markham being a prime example,”
Markham was the first Ontario municipality to switch to online voting in 2003. In 2006, voter turnout in Markham spiked 43 per cent, she said. “It transformed their voter turnout.” While in 2003, only 12 Ontario municipalities used online voting. Today, 194 towns and cities out of 414 that run their own elections, have switched to Internet voting.
Too many don’t vote. Are you willing to try something new? Democracy. Now.
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“Democracy.Now.” was first published in the May 16, 2019 issue of the Berkshire Record.
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