Four Things You Missed at the ELVIS 2.0 Meeting

Wayland’s Electronic Voting Implementation Subcommittee 2.0 continues to work toward bringing electronic voting to Wayland’s town meetings on a permanent basis.

Last week, the group met to discuss steps to take leading up to and at the upcoming April Town Meeting to ensure electronic voting will be offered going forward rather than on a town-meeting-by-town-meeting basis. Electronic voting at the coming Annual Town Meeting will be funded by a .

Here are four things you missed at last week’s ELVIS 2.0 meeting:

1. The Request for Proposals (RFP) has been issued and vendors have been asked to respond by Feb. 2. ELVIS 2.0 members will assess the functionality of each vendor, and the cost will be assessed separately. The committee functions in an advisory capacity with the final decision being up to the Board of Selectmen.

2. Making electronic voting a regular feature of Wayland’s town meetings could be accomplished through either a bylaw change or making the cost of electronic voting part of the general budget for town meetings. Making it part of the budget is more flexible and a bylaw change could expose the town to making a change that isn’t appropriate long-term. 

“Electronic voting should just be part of the budget like chairs and the money for the people you pay to do check-in,” Bernstein said. ”It’s just part of what we do for town meeting.” 

3. The ELVIS 2.0 subcommittee agreed that an article in the 2012 April Town Meeting should be a resolution that requests the Board of Selectmen and the Finance Committee include sufficient funding in the FY13, FY14 and FY15 budget for electronic voting to be present at all sessions of all town meetings. 

The subcommittee cannot submit an article, so Bernstein and Alan Reiss will submit an article with the support of the subcommittee members.

4. Subcommittee member Kim Cook was chosen and agreed to serve as the group’s secretary pro tempore.

ELVIS 2.0 will next meet on Feb. 8.