Down a narrow hallway on the lower level of town hall there is a vault — picture “The Italian Job” or “Ocean’s Eleven.” When the combination is spun and the heavy steel door opens, it exposes stacks and stacks of … mail.
In its busiest seasons, the town clerk’s office can receive up to 8,000 pieces of mail a month. And until Monday night, each envelope had to be opened by hand with an old-school letter opener better suited for spreading butter.
At the Oct. 20 Special Town Meeting, members voted to support Town Clerk Louise Miller’s request for a new opener. The $12,000 Quadient IM-410 Automatic Letter Opener will save money and significant time, not to mention paper cuts, for both full- and part-time employees in the clerk’s office, especially around election and census periods.
During elections, the town hires hourly employees to help open mail-in ballots. Each ballot, which is sent in two envelopes, needs to be slit open and both envelopes date stamped. In the couple of weeks preceding the election, the staff comes in to begin processing the early votes. Two people are tasked with opening and stamping, which can take up to six hours each day. Miller estimates it costs the town $.25 to open and $.075 to date stamp each piece of mail for workers paid $15 an hour. The IM-410 will be able to open 400 envelopes per minute — a rate even Edward Scissorhands likely could not beat. Based on these calculations, the machine should pay for itself in one year.
Helen Atkinson, who has worked in the town clerk’s office for 30 years, said she’s seen a huge increase in mail, especially around voting. “I’ve seen the changes,” she said. “Vote by mail has tripled, people drop stuff off all the time. People used to like to vote in person.” But a lot has changed since COVID-19, Atkinson said. Between March 2024 and April 2025, across four elections and two primaries, the clerk’s office opened 55,000 envelopes.
Miller stresses the focus for her office is efficiency. If even those two tasks are automated, which would allow election workers to focus their time on other parts of the process such as checking voters off the registry, scanning the ballots, and sorting the ballots into piles of 50, the processing time could be shortened from from two weeks to one. The automation would also enable the envelopes to be opened before workers arrive.
The risk of damaging mail content will also be solved. “You have to be careful to cut just the very top of the envelope so you don’t accidentally slice a check,” said Miller. “If a ballot is torn, you can’t tape it because the [ballot] machine won’t take it.” The new machine uses milling technology that dissolves the seam of the envelope, preserving whatever is inside.
Although the spotlight is on the new machine’s mail-opening function, its date-stamping feature is not to be ignored. For decades, employees have had to feed each piece by hand through a commercial date stamper that sounds like an anvil hitting the floor — especially galling for the accounting department that sits directly below it. The new machine can be programmed and stamps customized, and it won’t give employees a concussion.
As with other tools in the clerk’s office, Miller said other town departments should be able to make use of it as well. For example, a paper folding machine purchased in January has been used also by the assessors’ office, the treasurer’s office and the retirement board. “The folding machine has been a game changer,” said Atkinson. “No one believed it until it was here.”
As the IM-410 takes over a tedious, labor-intensive task, employees will be freed up to focus on the more relevant parts of their job. When the mail piles up, other tasks get postponed. “Filing. Vitals get pushed back — birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates,” said Miller. “Online (requests) take longer. Bills.”
Streamlining and modernizing operations has been part of Miller’s mission since she took the town clerk position a year and a half ago. Other items on her efficiency vision board include a machine that will also stuff and seal envelopes and a dedicated and water- and fire-proof outdoor ballot box.
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