The results on election night were 904 votes for Yes, 847 votes for No, and just 7 blanks out of 1,758 ballots cast. This election result should end Bridgewater’s years long debate over adult-use cannabis sales, which started after the town narrowly voted NO on the state-wide ballot question that legalized adult-use cannabis in 2016. A loud and well-organized group spent years working to prevent adult-use cannabis sales in town, with wins in town meeting and in Town Council votes. In elections since 2016, however, supporters of adult-use cannabis sales have prevailed. In 2021, the Town Council included a non-binding ballot question about adult-use cannabis sales on the local election ballot, and that question won by a slightly larger margin than the result this past Saturday.

RUNNING A SUCCESSFUL LOCAL CAMPAIGN

Gregory Maynard organized and managed the vote yes campaign, working with the ownership of Alternative Compassion Services, one of Bridgewater’s two medical cannabis dispensaries. The vote yes campaign was formally organized as a local ballot question committee called 'Vote Yes for Local Business - Alternative Compassion Services’ in November 2022. The name of the company had to be included in the committee name to comply with state rules for ballot question committees that get the majority of their funding from a single source.

Reaching out to voters in-person and digitally was important because the special election was competing with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years for attention. What the non-binding result in 2021 showed was that while the vote no advocates were the loudest voice in the room, there was a lot of support for the vote yes campaign. The narrow one-week window of New Years Day to the election meant that much of the work reaching out and identifying voters needed to be done in 2022. There was added urgency to this task because the vote no advocates had shown the ability to organize Bridgewater residents in the past, having successfully worked against adult-use sales at town meetings.

To ensure that voters knew about the election and were persuaded to support a binding ballot question, the vote yes campaign had an energetic social media presence, posting not only on their own page, but also engaging with voters on a number of community groups’ pages. Vote yes supporters in town also posted in those same groups and amplified the campaign’s messaging. The campaign’s social media engagement was backed up by a website and on-line advertising.

In addition to digital organizing, the campaign hosted a series of Meet & Greets that featured ACS' CEO Stephen Werther. The events were simple, providing an opportunity for residents to talk to the owner of a local cannabis dispensary about the business and the ballot question. At the half-dozen events, Stephen and his wife Ellen sat at a table or bar during regular business hours with flyers about the election and the vote yes campaign. In addition to attending the events, Stephen also served as the campaign’s spokesperson in an election preview program produced by the local cable access station.

Thanks to the outreach the campaign had done, when mail pieces started arriving in voters' mailboxes, many had already heard about the special election and ballot question. The final week of the campaign included last round of phone calls and texts to the hundreds of supporters the campaign had identified over the previous month and a half, a final set of in-person meet and greets, and digital advertising. On Election Day, the vote yes campaign had dozens of sign holders throughout the day and got a positive response from voters. The results backed up the positive response with a narrow but convincing win for the vote yes campaign.