Town Meeting TV Gears Up for Its Election Results Show

Election Days are like the Super Bowl for media outlets. In Vermont, few bring more to the big game year after year than Town Meeting TV, the public-access television station previously known as Channel 17.

From its studios in Burlington’s Old North End, the station provides robust election coverage through candidate forums and budget presentations leading up to Election Day, and a surprisingly robust poll operation on the day itself.

The coverage culminates in a live election-night results show that combines low-budget production with inexperienced on-air talent in an earnest — and usually successful — attempt to broadcast results from the greater Burlington area before other media outlets. 

It’s a charming if slightly awkward affair and one that captures the true spirit of local democracy. Election night viewers won’t see any colorful high-tech maps or snazzy graphics projecting winners, and the station’s technical glitches can be startlingly evident. But there’s a bigger point in showing the sausage making in real time, say those involved in the effort.  

“It’s supposed to be messy,” said Meghan O’Rourke, codirector of the Center for Media & Democracy, the nonprofit that oversees Town Meeting TV. “We’re using the medium of television the way God intended: to connect people.”

The station’s coverage has helped fill a void left as other under-resourced media outlets such as the Burlington Free Press have scaled back their election coverage over the past two decades.

Founded in 1990, Town Meeting TV is one of two Queen City organizations that provide public access to the airwaves. The station hosts shows, covers press conferences, broadcasts municipal meetings and provides equipment for residents to create their own content. It serves about 25,000 households across a coverage area spanning Burlington, South Burlington, Essex, Essex Junction, Winooski, St. George, Williston and Colchester. That may be a fraction of the state’s residents, but Town Meeting TV takes its job seriously all the same.

While the station also covers state and national elections, it is on Vermont’s annual Town Meeting Day, which falls on March 3 this year, that it shines brightest.

Preparations begin well in advance. Candidates for local office must file petitions by 5 p.m. on the sixth Monday preceding the election to get on the ballot. The following morning, Jordan Mitchell, the 26-year-old University of Vermont grad who manages election coverage for Town Meeting TV, sends an email to town clerks in the station’s coverage area asking for names.

She then contacts every candidate to invite them onto the air, even those running unopposed. She also invites municipal officials to present their proposed budgets.

“Our goal is to get everyone in,” Mitchell said.

The station’s everybody’s-invited approach differs from other media outlets, who often make judgment calls about which candidates to feature or which ones to allow onto the debate stage.

And the moderated candidate conversations have a much different feel than a traditional political debate, which is why the station prefers to call them “forums.” Candidates receive questions in advance and are each afforded roughly 15 minutes to speak.

“We’re not playing a gotcha game,” O’Rourke said. “We recognize people are running for office as a public service, and in most cases, even if they’re coming at it with an ideology, they’re doing it with a sense of purpose: to serve the whole community.”

The forums typically wrap up by the third week in February, giving the station’s staff a week to gear up for Election Day.

The work begins early on the day itself: Part-time staffers and volunteers head to the station around 6 a.m. to pick up cameras and receive their assignments. Then, in groups of two or three, they deploy to polling stations to conduct on-camera interviews of voters that get edited down and aired on the evening results show.

The interviews not only fill space on the live show but also preserve a snapshot of the community, O’Rourke said.

Take Burlington’s New North End. Exit interviews from the polling station at the Robert Miller Community & Recreation Center in the late 2000s featured older residents saying they were voting down the school budget because it was too expensive. “Fifteen years later, you’ve got people showing up to the polls with their kid on the back of the bike,” O’Rourke said.

“It’s really interesting to see how a community changes through the lens of its democracy,” she said.

The afternoon of Town Meeting Day is spent on last-minute preparations, such as checking all of the prepared graphics to fix any typos.

At 5:25 p.m., the station goes live for a brief preview show, where the two hosts highlight some of the day’s biggest votes. Then they’re off the air for about an hour before the show resumes when polls close at 7 p.m.

Bobby Lussier, a 28-year-old former Town Meeting TV staffer who now works at Vermont Public, will host this year’s results show alongside former Chittenden County state senator Debbie Ingram. Lussier has hosted the show three times and said the gig requires a lot of prep work — and a healthy dose of flexibility.  

That’s because there are many variables, starting with the results themselves. In 2024, the station’s staff, along with most others in the local media, privately assumed that Democrat Joan Shannon was likely to win the Burlington mayoral election. And so, it sent an experienced camera team capable of live streaming over to the Democratic results party at Halvorson’s Upstreet Café, where the victory party would presumably play out, and dispatched a field producer on their second day on the job to the Progressives’ party at Zero Gravity Craft Brewery.

But as the results trickled in and it became clear that Progressive Emma Mulvaney-Stanak was the victor, Steven Heron, the station’s codirector, called the newbie producer: “You’re suddenly the most important person we’ve got in Burlington,” he said.

A last-minute delivery of streaming equipment allowed the station to air live footage from the Prog party. And though the feed wasn’t perfect — the audio was delayed from the video — viewers at least got to hear Mulvaney-Stanak’s speech capping her historic victory as the first-ever female mayor of Burlington.

It’s not only the results that defy expectations. Technical mishaps frequently pop up despite everyone’s best efforts. During one show, a microphone became unplugged while on air, forcing Mitchell to crawl beneath the old wooden desk where the hosts sit to plug it back in. 

Every candidate on the ballot is also invited to the station for a live election-night interview, leading to some particularly memorable moments.

Fifteen minutes into the 2024 electionnight show, Lussier’s cohost, Mark Johnson, kicked it over to Travis Washington for an interview with independent Burlington mayoral candidate Will Emmons.

Emmons proceeded to go on a three-minute, largely incomprehensible tirade in which he accused his competitors of extortion and challenged Steven Spielberg — yes, that Steven Spielberg — to “riff it out” with him. When Washington went to ask a follow-up question, O’Rourke could be seen in the window behind them, making the universal “cut it off” gesture.

Last year, after a particularly antagonistic campaign season for the Burlington City Council, reelected Councilor Melo Grant (P-Central District) gave a raw, emotional interview, appearing near tears as she described personal attacks she’d experienced on social media.

As voting night wears on, calls start coming in from a small army of volunteers pre-positioned at local polling stations to get the results as early as possible. O’Rourke and a few others back at the station enter the figures into a massive spreadsheet that feeds into a dedicated results web page. Mitchell passes the results along to the hosts to be shared on air.

The show wraps up once all the results are in, which usually takes about two and a half hours for local elections, unless something funky happens. The staff then heads home, before returning the following day for a debrief of what went well and what could be improved.

Something rarely discussed at these postshow debriefs: views. While the election show can garner anywhere from a few hundred views to over a thousand depending on the election, the station does not concern itself with such things, O’Rourke said.

That’s in part because the station can only ever get an incomplete picture: While views on the YouTube stream can reach as high as a thousand or more, the cable companies that also carry Town Meeting TV refuse to share viewership data. But the station’s mission remains the same, regardless of how many eyeballs are on it, O’Rourke said.

“It’s about: Are you telling this one particular story in this community well?” And as long as we can keep doing that,” O’Rourke said, “we will, because it’s fun, because it’s meaningful, because it’s useful and because it’s the right thing to do.” ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Lights, Camera, Democracy! | Town Meeting TV is gearing up for its quirky, unpredictable and very Burlington election-results program”

This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.

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