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Town of Mason information & documents:

Has been moved to Town of Mason website

Correction:

Sunday, March 8, 2009: I have just received notification from "Uncle Sam" that I missed a Correction in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in which they clarified that they had used the wrong email address in trying to reach The Mason Coalition for a Secret Ballot. Thus their reporter's statement in her April 22, 2008, article that "Repeated e-mails to the group for more details or comment were not returned." was due to error, not to the group's lack of response. I quoted her report and thus inadvertently further spread the misinformation.
My apology to "Uncle Sam", along with his email, can be downloaded from: Correction (.PDF 308K)

Opinion pieces:

I have added a statement of my personal views on why I believe SB2 is wrong for Mason. I titled it "In this I believe" because it is a statement of belief, and of faith, rather than data, which I wanted to keep clearly separated from the factual information presented below. It can be downloaded from: In this I believe (.PDF 84K)

I also paid to place an insert in our local Mason Grapevine's early March 2009 issue; it can be downloaded from: March 2009 Grapevine insert (.PDF 156K)

Charles Moser of Mason has asked me to include his letter: UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU TO KEEP TOWN MEETING (.PDF 60K)

Factual information on the adoption of SB2 and its effect on voter participation:

The February 17 hearing about SB2 for the town revealed a dearth of public information about SB2.

To try to fill this gap I researched the history of SB2 adoptions, then called the Town Clerks of the 62 SB2 towns to gauge its effect on public participation. The calls were made February 19, 20 and 23, 2009.

At present 62 towns use SB2; 65 had adopted it, 3 later rescinded it.

Half of the SB2 adoptions occurred in its first year (1996), 70% were completed by 1998, the remaining 30% trickled in over the following decade.

There have been 131 attempts in 96 towns to adopt SB2 of which 65 succeeded (50%) with 3 subsequent rescissions.

In the 65 towns which adopted SB2 there have been 37 attempts to rescind SB2 of which 3 succeeded (8%).

The average size of towns adopting SB2 is 5,472 registered voters, 5.6 X Mason's size of 969 voters; they range from 658 (Carroll) to 20,654 (Salem). Of the 62 SB2 towns, 59 are larger than Mason and 50 are more than twice Mason's size. Of the 3 towns which rescinded SB2, 2 were considerably smaller than Mason, one was 3X larger.

At the most recent (mostly 2009) town SB2 Deliberative Sessions, the average attendance reported by Town Clerks was only 83 including the town officials. The range was from 30 to 207 with a median of 75. The attendance was not related to town size - large towns were as likely to have an attendance of 83 as small towns.

Attendance as a percent of voters averaged 2.5% (1 out of 40 voters) over the 62 towns surveyed. In the 12 smallest SB2 towns (fewer than 2000 voters) the average attendance was 6.3% (1 out of 16 voters).

I've placed a more detailed report on the web so you can download it. It lists all 96 towns which have considered SB2, shows the history of all attempts at passage or revocation, and includes for each town the number of registered voters and the number which attended the most recent Town SB2 Deliberative Session. The SB2 towns are listed in order of size; the others alphabetically. This PDF file can be downloaded from:

A second PDF document contains the following graphs:
1) voter participation in Mascenic District from 1991 through 2008, of which the years 1997 through 2008 were under SB2
2) the 62 town SB2 attendance data plotted versus town size, both as the raw number of voters and as the % of voters attending
This PDF file can be downloaded from

In calling the Town Clerks I simply explained that I was researching some data for our own Town Meeting and that I hoped they could provide a count (or good estimate) for voter attendance at their most recent town SB2 Deliberative Session. The majority reported their recent 2009 sessions, though some towns on later schedules provided instead their 2008 session attendances.

A surprising number took pains to make sure I understood the count included all the "officials" who had to attend. Many made comments which made it clear they were unhappy with SB2. Some asked why I was asking and I would reply that Mason had SB2 adoption on the ballot and I was trying to understand its consequences - uniformly they then counselled very strongly against adoption.

Some typical comments:

Candia reported that the final (ballot) votes had only increased by maybe 20% (going from 500 to 600) over what they used to get in Town Meetings, but that SB2 had increased their meeting costs 4-fold and caused many other problems.

Rye said "SB2 was the worst thing that had happened Rye"; and went on to say SB2 is easy to vote in but almost impossible to vote out...

Plaistow said their attendance of 35 was actually pretty high; usually just the town officials plus 5 or fewer "public", those often spouses of the officials who had to be there.

Merrimack reported that the most common voter complaint was "that a small number of people controlled the ballot"; in other words, that small group which attends the Deliberative Session.

One really surprising item is that the size of the small "in group" which does attend a deliberative session is fairly constant across a huge range of town sizes. That average attendance is 83 and if you look at a range of, say, 53 to 113 (i.e., 83 ± 30) it covers almost all towns from little Carroll (658 voters) through Salem (20,654 voters). I'm not sure what to make of that very strange phenomenon.

The other obvious effect is that in in the smaller towns, fewer than 1 voter in 16 bothers to attend; in the larger towns this drops to fewer than 1 in 50 or 1 in 100... The average over all 62 SB2 towns is 1 voter in 40 attends.

I hope this helps fill in some of the information gap.

Please feel free to forward or send this information and any of the PDF files mentioned above to whomever you believe might be interested. This is a topic in desperate need of public discussion!

Garth Fletcher