The state has opened early voting for the presidential elections and granted faster technology to help make it happen for the first time ever this year. That’s beneficial to residents, but there’s still more to be done, said Town Clerk Lynn Medeiros.

Since opening the polls on October 24 — a period that will run until November 4 in Room 309 at Town Hall — Medeiros has been busy. Medeiros explained that all municipalities had to offer early voting during regular hours, but she and her staff took advantage of a state grant to extend those hours past her normal 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. shift, and to add polls at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for a couple of days.

[Check out early voting hours here.]

“There’s a voter every minute and a half if you take the numbers for what we’re doing per day,” she said. The UMass locations brought in about 100 voters each day, she explained, while the Town Hall polls attract approximately 250 residents daily, said Medeiros.

Medeiros quickly pointed to updated technology as adding to the program's success. The poll pad, as she called it, is an iPad that syncs voter attendance across voting locations, making multiple polls possible.

“The state approved them just for early voting because we wouldn’t be able to do multiple locations [without them],” said Medeiros, comparing the poll pads to the traditional binders that list every voter in the precinct on paper and must be checked by hand. “I would love to see them approved for all the elections. I think we’re going to get there, it’s just steps.”

Medeiros said that the immediacy and color coding helps her staff check in voters more quickly, a sentiment echoed by Precinct No. 9 Warden David Cordeiro.

“The information comes up faster. You don't have to flip through pages,” he said.

Alongside early voting, online registration is changing the way Medeiros’ office functions.

“I’m not seeing the paper piles,” she said, explaining that previously, registration slips would be mailed to or turned into Town Hall. “We’re getting in a couple hundred a day, but it’s a different visual.”

Registration closed on October 19, but Medeiros had to wait for the last of the postmarked applications to file in. With paper registrations, staff input information by hand, while with online registrations, staff might clean up registration forms, and print out and mail an acknowledgement letter, said Medeiros.

Not all the tech is completely up-to-date, though, said Medeiros, pointing out the machine for handicap voters.

“It’s a 40- to-50-pound machine that you’re lifting up. It should be a laptop,” said Medeiros. She also mentioned that she hopes to have upgraded voting machines — used for collecting and tallying ballots — for town elections in April.