Terms of use
Last updated: October 2026. MyTownVote (townvote.com) is operated by Starting Line Consulting (Randall Sanborn), 2 McKay Rd, Hopkinton, MA 01748. By using MyTownVote you agree to these terms and to the privacy policy.
What MyTownVote is — and isn't
- An independent forum for residents. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any town government, and it takes no side on any question.
- Straw polls are unofficial and are not a town vote. Petitions on MyTownVote are shows of support, not the signed paper petitions the law requires for warrant articles.
- Topic summaries and analysis are written with AI from the town's own documents and checked for balance, but they can contain mistakes. The town's documents are the authority; members can open them on each topic. See How we stay balanced.
Accounts
- One account per person. Resident membership is for people who live in the town; you confirm your address once a year.
- Choose a display name that isn't someone else's name and isn't offensive. Keep your sign-in secure.
Resident membership
- The membership price is shown before you pay. It renews automatically each year until you cancel.
- Cancel any time from your account page; membership continues to the end of the paid year. Payments aren't refunded except where the law requires.
Discussion rules
- Discuss the issue, not people. Criticism of officials' public actions is fine; harassing residents isn't.
- No threats, hate, personal information about others (addresses, phone numbers), spam, or impersonation.
- Posts are screened automatically and can be held for a moderator. Moderators may remove posts and mute or ban accounts that break the rules.
Acceptable use
MyTownVote is for residents to read and take part. You agree not to:
- scrape, crawl, or use bots or other automated means to access, copy or download the site, its topics, analyses, summaries or documents;
- bulk-download or systematically collect documents, analyses or member content, or get around limits we put on access;
- use the site or its content to build, train or improve a competing product, service, dataset or AI model, or resell or republish its content;
- interfere with the site, test its security without our written permission, or access another person's account.
We may suspend accounts or block access that breaks these rules.
Our content and yours
The site, its design, and its summaries, analyses, timelines and other content we create belong to Starting Line Consulting; you may read and share links to them, and quote them briefly with credit. Town documents are public records; news passages belong to their publishers. You own what you post, and you give MyTownVote permission to show it on the site, in MyTownVote emails and alerts, and to process it to run the service (for example, screening and counts). Deleting your account removes your posts.
Limits
MyTownVote is provided as is. We aren't responsible for decisions made by towns, or for what other users post. To the extent the law allows, our liability is limited to what you paid in the last 12 months.
Changes and contact
We may update these terms and will tell members of important changes by email. These terms are governed by the laws of Massachusetts. Questions: support@mytownvote.com.