WHATELY — With hours upon hours spent in the aftermath of an election counting ballots, Whately’s town clerk hopes to speed up the process with an electronic tabulator.

Amy Lavallee is looking into the purchase of an electronic voting tabulator for future elections, which she said will significantly cut down on time spent hand-counting ballots. While she has a $5,000 grant in hand, she needs an additional $2,000 to complete the purchase from New Hampshire-based LHS Associates.

“I was surprised by how tedious the process is of counting afterwards. As a voter you don’t think about the background and what happens after you put that ballot in,” Lavallee said at Whately’s election location, the Town Hall. “After doing my fourth [election], I thought, ‘There has to be a better way,’ and there is a better way.”

The voting process, she emphasized, would hardly change at all for voters walking into Town Hall, as they will still fill out the traditional ballot and hand it to election staff. The major difference would be that ballots wouldn’t go into the historical ballot box anymore.

For the Town Clerk’s Office, this change would be huge. Lavallee said she spends a lot of time trying to find residents to come to Town Hall at 8 p.m. on Election Day to help count ballots late into the night. Even for a low-turnout election, like this year’s annual election, where 325 voters came out, it can take hours to count and certify results. More than 1,100 voters in Whately participated in the 2020 presidential election.

Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said Massachusetts is down to just 49 towns, out of 351 communities, that still use hand-counted paper ballots for elections. She added that Plympton in southeastern Massachusetts was the most recent town to adopt the use of a ballot tabulator and its first election will be the November presidential election.

“Only towns with relatively few ballots to count are still using the hand-crank ballot boxes. With the exception of the town of Royalston, all of these communities are single-precinct towns,” O’Malley said. “As voters have come to expect results to be announced quickly, and population in some towns has grown, more communities have opted for electronic tabulation of ballots.”

She mentioned Gill is not included in the 49 communities that hand-count votes, as the town sometimes switches between hand-counted and electronic vote tabulation to lower costs, since programming the tabulators costs money.

Whately, however, will still be hand-counting ballots during the upcoming presidential election, as Lavallee is in the process of securing more money to purchase the equipment. If all goes to plan, elections in 2025 could be conducted with electronic vote counting.

To answer residents’ questions about a potential switch to electronic tabulation, Lavallee is hosting a community information session on Wednesday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. at Town Hall, 194 Chestnut Plain Road. She will be joined by a representative from LHS Associates.

The transition from a paper ballot community, if it happens, could potentially spell the end of the town’s longstanding tradition of depositing ballots into the historical ballot box and cranking the lever, as Lavallee said the Secretary of State’s Office told her she cannot put ballots into the ballot box before feeding them into the tabulator.

Before the residents of Whately pull out their pitchforks and march to her office, though, Lavallee said she plans to give the box to the Whately Historical Society, which will display it during elections and, if the state allows Whately to operate like Gill, pull it out for use during the annual town election.

“If I can use this for local elections, it’s a no-brainer,” Lavallee said. “Everybody loves the box; I love the box, I get it.”

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.