About this event

As a No Kings host, you are building a mass movement against authoritarianism. That means creating actions that build power in your community. In this training, leading experts will teach you how to grow your supporters and empower new folks to take on new responsibilities and roles. Learn key skills like having effective conversations with potential volunteers and creating distributed leadership structures.

This training will help you bring new people into your No Kings organizing, support them on their journeys to becoming leaders, and build a more sustainable organizing model that works for you, your community, and our movement!

May 27: Core Training

June 3: Optional Practice Workshop

This training is part of the 8-week No Kings Mobilization Lab series for No Kings host teams to learn skills to support you in the fight against authoritarian abuses of power. Sign up for other trainings and workshops in the series here: https://www.nokings.org/mobilization-lab

Millis Election Forum

 On Tuesday, May 5, the newly formed Millis Republican Town committee held an election forum in which people running for office presented or had their letters written. 

The two candidates for Select Board Erin Underhill and Jim McCay answered numerous questions from the organizers and the attendees.

This is a link to a video of the event, which took about an hour and twenty minutes.

May Day Call to Action Standouts

 

May Day Is a Day of Action

May Day is when we build collective muscle — and use it. It's a day to stand up against the concentrated power of those who use money and influence to steal our future.

Hear Ezra Levin from Indivisible explain why this moment matters: link

Millis is taking it to the street.

From April 27 through May 1, Millis Democracy will be holding signs on Route 109W, across from Town Hall, during evening rush hour (4:30–5:30 PM). Our message to our neighbors driving by:

• 🛍️ Shop Local — keep your dollars in the community
• 📵 Avoid High-Power Social Media — don't feed the grift
• ✊ Disrupt the Grift — on May 1st, take whatever action you can

We need 3–6 people each day. One person can easily carry two signs, so every volunteer counts.

👉 Sign up on SignUp Genius to hold a sign on one or more days: link

Show your neighbors that Millis shows up.

Attendee Instructions

Coordinate among each other who will pick up & drop off signs at Martha's shed. Email Martha martha@millisdemocracy.org for address. 

The signs have numbers. The US flag can go anywhere or be left out. One sign can take a little flag.

Welcome to Millis Democracy

 Welcome to the online home of the Millis Democracy Group!

We're so glad you've found us. Here in Millis, we believe in the power of an engaged and informed citizenry. This website serves as a central hub for our community, dedicated to fostering open dialogue, promoting civic participation, and ensuring that every voice is heard in the democratic process.

Whether you're a long-time resident or new to our wonderful town, we invite you to explore, learn, and connect. Here you'll find:

• Information about upcoming meetings and events: Stay up-to-date on opportunities to gather, discuss, and act.

• Resources for civic engagement: Discover how you can make a difference, from local elections to town initiatives.

• Opportunities for respectful discussion: Share your perspectives and hear from fellow Millis residents on important local issues.

Our strength lies in our collective commitment to a vibrant and responsive local government. We encourage you to join us, contribute your ideas, and help shape the future of Millis.

Thank you for being a part of the Millis Democracy Group. Let's work together to strengthen our community!

Millis Democracy Meeting Agenda 4/14/26

1. Visit from Selectboard candidate Jim McKay
2. MA Democratic Convention preparations (5/31)
3. May Day action brainstorming (5/1)
4. Communities not Cages National Day of Action with Indivisible Sherborn (4/25) 
   
   
   
5. Social media outreach:
1. https://www.facebook.com/millisdems, 
2. https://bsky.app/profile/millisdems.bsky.social

Millis No Kings Protest on March 28

Facing the Town Hall

Lined up on Main Street

Enthusiasm and Fortitude!

Thank you to all of the protesters who braved the cold to stand up to tyranny!

 

NoKings 3 Millis

Millis NoKings 3 Standout and Food Drive

Millis No Kings standout Saturday Mar 28,

• We will stand out 10:30am-12noon, in front of Town Hall on both sides of the street

• Speakers and Singing at 11:30am

• RSVP here

Speakers

• If you wish to speak at 11:30, please register at the info table.

• Expected speakers so far: Millis Coffee & Conversations Amy Cohen, Millis Food Bank director Elizabeth Derwin, Senator Becca Rausch, Representative James Arena-DeRosa, Selectboard Erin Underhill, US Rep candidate Jason Poulos, UCC Millis Minister James Adams, Millis resident Joris Friedman-Wils

Parking

• Accessible parking is around town hall.

• General parking is at Clyde Brown and High School

Support the Millis Food Bank

• Support local families by donating cereal, pasta sauce, juice boxes, tuna and laundry detergent.

• Donation boxes provided

Greeter and Marshal Help Needed

• If you have been to events before please consider being a marshal or greeter of new attendees. We have materials to hand out.

Social Media 

• National requests that we use the hashtags [#NoKingsCity+StateAbbreviation] and #NoKings. So for Millis we use #NoKingsMillisMA and #NoKings.

Safety Precautions

• Safety Marshals (not law enforcement) can be identified by the blue bibs they wear. Contact one of them in case you see suspicious or worrisome activity, or there is a medical issue.

• Nonviolent participation is the paramount goal. Please do not engage in any activity that puts this at risk.

• Counter-protesters or provocateurs may attempt to drag you into an exchange. Please do not engage, simply ignore. Talk to the person standing next to you or just look away.

• Stay on the sidewalk and off the street. If the numbers are significant we will stand out on both sides of the street. Use the crosswalks – please do not j-walk.

• We have met with the Millis police chief, and he has assisted us in crafting our safety plan. He has educated his officers on duty that day regarding our event.

• Visit our information table and learn how to be further involved in community service and resistance work!

• Introduce yourself to people you don’t know – we are building community!

• Come to the steps of town hall at 11:30, if you like, for some singing and speakers.

• Bundle up, it’s going to be chilly!

• Have a joyous, peaceful, activist day!!

Other Events

• Click the image at the top to expand it. Screenshot to your phone.

• Boston main events start at 2:00PM so you can get there and attend Millis.

• Framingham Finale at 5:00PM to make a Human Peace Sign on the common.

 Schedule for No Kings Protest on March 28.  Find your location!

 

Let us gather in front of Town Hall Millis to support our democracy and the bill of rights. Let's make new friends with those who share this passion.

We have the power and are claiming it together. No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.

What began in 2025 as a single day of defiance has become a sustained national resistance to tyranny, spreading from small towns to city centers and across every community determined to defend democracy. Our peaceful movement is bigger than ever.

When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option. We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence.

On March 28th, rise up, take to the streets, and say it loud: no thrones, no crowns, no kings. We’re not watching history happen—we’re making it. Join us!

Sign up on Mobilize us!

Millis Democratic Town Committee Caucus

The Millis Democratic Caucus will be held Tuesday, March 10 from 7pm-8pm at the Millis Town Hall. The purpose of the caucus is to elect delegates to attend the 2026 Democratic State Convention. Delegates will vote to determine which state-wide candidates appear on primary ballots. 

All Democrats registered to vote in Millis are invited to participate and are encouraged to run for convention delegate. The convention will take place May 29-30 at the DCU Center in Worcester.

The caucus is open to the public and press, but only Millis’s registered and pre-registered Democrats are eligible to run and vote. Pre-registered Democrats must be at least 16 years old on the caucus date. Party affiliation change is possible at the caucus or in advance online Massachusetts Online Voter Registration System. 

Registration will open at 6:30 PM. The caucus will begin at 7:00 PM. The caucus doors will close at 7:15 PM. Everyone waiting in line to register at 7:15 PM will be admitted to the caucus. Anyone admitted after 7:15 PM will be designated as a guest and will not be able to run for delegate or to vote.

Those running as a delegate or alternate should be present at the caucus or on zoom to be elected. However, if there are not enough candidates present to fill all delegate and alternate positions, two-thirds of those present and voting may move to have a candidate’s name placed in nomination despite the candidate’s absence, provided that the candidate has notified the Chair of their interest in running.

Millis Democrats will vote to elect 6 delegates and 4 alternates to represent Millis at the convention. Those not selected as a convention delegate or an alternate, and who meet the qualifications, can apply separately to be an add-on delegate in the following categories: youth, minority, disabled, LGBTQ+, veteran, or ask about being a convention volunteer. This year’s convention will be a Nominating Convention, where we meet to hear from those running for office in 2026 and vote to determine which candidates advance to the Democratic primary ballot.

To get zoom details and/or to let us coming register here.

Election Integrity — Audit Standards

Why Sample Audits Don’t Catch Algorithmic Vote Manipulation

After every election, officials point to post-election audits as proof the results can be trusted. Massachusetts audits 3% of precincts. Every state has some version of this. It sounds like verification. It isn’t — not for the manipulation vectors that actually exist in modern computerized voting systems.

Colorado figured this out and replaced its fixed-percentage audit with a more rigorous Risk-Limiting Audit. Its own government report was blunt about why: simple sample audits provide “little or no assurance” they would “disclose, much less correct, an incorrect preliminary outcome.” That was Colorado’s verdict on the kind of audit Massachusetts still uses today. And even Colorado’s upgraded approach has the vulnerabilities described below.

Here are five reasons why sample audits fall short.

Vulnerability 01

Ballot Marking Device Barcodes Are Secret — Even to Auditors

In jurisdictions using Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs), your vote is recorded as a proprietary barcode. That barcode’s encoding is secret — there is no independent tool available to auditors that can verify what is actually written on it. The human-readable text printed on the paper may say one thing. The barcode the tabulator actually scans may say something different. There is no way to know.

The “paper trail” that auditors hand-count is not an independent record. It is an unverifiable output of the same system being audited. As security researchers Halderman and Springall demonstrated in their 2021 expert report on Georgia’s Dominion ImageCast X machines, malware could alter barcode encoding while leaving the human-readable text completely unchanged — invisible to any hand-count audit.

Auditing the memo line while the bank processes the routing number.

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Vulnerability 02

Upchain Manipulation Never Touches the Paper Ballots

Precinct tabulators report results to county Election Management Systems, which report to state Election Night Reporting systems. Manipulation inserted anywhere above the tabulator level never touches the paper ballots at all. A hand-count audit at the precinct level simply cannot see it.

This is not theoretical. The Election Truth Alliance’s analysis of the 2026 Kentucky 4th Congressional District Republican primary — the Thomas Massie race — found opposing fraud signals in individual counties that cancelled each other out at the district aggregate level. This cancellation effect in ratio/proportional space is a novel forensic signature consistent with manipulation occurring above the county layer. No precinct-level audit would detect it.

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Vulnerability 03

Concentrated Manipulation Targets the Precincts Least Likely to Be Audited

A random 3% precinct sample assumes manipulation, if present, would be distributed evenly. That’s not how targeted interference works.

The Election Truth Alliance documented evidence in the 2024 presidential election of a classic pattern: “flip enough blue to red to still win the likely unaudited city, but lose the state” — concentrated in high-turnout blue cities including Philadelphia and Las Vegas. High-volume tabulators serving dense urban precincts are precisely the units a small random sample is statistically least likely to hit. The audit is structurally blind to exactly where the anomalies appear.

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Vulnerability 04

The One-Step-Ahead Problem: Audit Design Is Public Knowledge

This is perhaps the deepest problem, and the one most rarely discussed.

Audit design assumes manipulation looks a certain way. Sophisticated actors design manipulation specifically to pass whatever audits exist. A 3% random precinct sample is public knowledge. The threshold that triggers a recount is public knowledge. These aren’t secrets to defend against — they are known targets to design around.

What is missing from every state audit protocol is required forensic statistical analysis: the kind that doesn’t assume what manipulation looks like, but instead detects anomalies in aggregate data patterns regardless of method. Peer-reviewed methodology for exactly this exists — Klimek et al. (PNAS, 2012) demonstrated how to identify systematic irregularities through turnout/vote-share distribution analysis. It is used by the Election Truth Alliance in their precinct-level analyses of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Minnesota, Florida, and the 2026 Kentucky primary.

Cybersecurity abandoned static checklists decades ago in favor of anomaly detection, precisely because attackers always find the gap between the rules. Election audits have not made that leap.

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Vulnerability 05

The Cardinal Rule of Software Security Is Being Violated

In every other domain of critical software infrastructure, the foundational principle is transparency: code that controls important systems must be open to independent inspection. This is not a fringe position. It is the cardinal rule of modern software security, embraced by governments, militaries, and technology companies worldwide. Secret code cannot be trusted, because it cannot be verified.

Election software violates this rule entirely. The source code for voting machine software is proprietary and closed. The hardware designs are similarly opaque. Independent security researchers cannot inspect them. Jurisdictions cannot audit them. The public cannot verify them. Voters are asked to trust a black box controlled by private vendors — vendors whose software could contain bugs, backdoors, or deliberate manipulation that no audit would ever surface.

The computer science community has understood this for decades. San Francisco — home to some of the world’s leading software engineers — has been pushing to build exactly the right alternative: an open source paper-ballot voting system whose code anyone can inspect, verify, and independently build. The San Francisco Elections Commission passed a resolution supporting this unanimously in 2015. The city’s Open Source Voting System Technical Advisory Committee has produced detailed technical recommendations. Supporters include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub, and Code for America.

Former California Secretary of State Alex Padilla put it plainly: “Open source is the ultimate in transparency and accountability for all.” The computer experts of the Bay Area are pointing the way. The rest of the country should follow.

Secret code cannot be trusted, because it cannot be verified. Every other domain of critical software infrastructure understands this. Election administration has not caught up.

Bottom line: A sample audit checks whether a small paper hand-count matches machine output in those precincts. It does not test the machine output itself, does not test what happened above the tabulator layer, cannot catch manipulation specifically designed to stay beneath its detection threshold, and cannot detect vulnerabilities in source code that no one outside the vendor is permitted to inspect. These are not hypothetical concerns. They are documented vulnerabilities with forensic evidence and peer-reviewed methodology behind them — and a growing expert consensus on the solution.

Further Reading

Code Red: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy by Jonathan Simon — the systemic case for why these vulnerabilities have led almost every other functional democracy to abandon computerized counting at the precinct level.
Available on Amazon

Election Truth Alliance — precinct-level statistical analyses of Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Minnesota, Florida, and the 2026 Kentucky 4th Congressional District primary.
electiontruthalliance.org

Halderman & Springall (2021): Expert report on Dominion ImageCast X BMD vulnerabilities, submitted in federal court proceedings in Georgia.
Full report (PDF)

Klimek et al. (2012): “Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read the paper

San Francisco Open Source Voting System Project — the model for transparent, independently verifiable election infrastructure.
sfopenvoting.org

San Francisco Open Source Voting System Technical Advisory Committee recommendations.
Full recommendations

Colorado Secretary of State Risk-Limiting Audit Final Report — the government report concluding that simple fixed-percentage audits provide “little or no assurance” they would “disclose, much less correct, an incorrect preliminary outcome.”
Full report (PDF)

Massachusetts 2024 Post-Election Audit results.
sec.state.ma.us

#ElectionIntegrity    #AuditOurVotes

 

Perfect Anthem for the Moment.  Pass it on!

Join the Millis Dems at the No Kings demonstration on March 28 from 10:30 am - 12:00pm in front of the Millis Town Hall at 900 Main Street.  The protest will be from 10:30-11:30 and speakers from 11:30-12:00pm. Bring your own signs and some to share if you are able.  Families/kids welcome. 

More details to come!

ICE out for Good: Millis

Millis Democracy and the Resistance Salon invite the community to gather together in peace on 

January 9 at 5:00-6:00 P.M.

in front of the Millis Town Hall to mourn the loss of Renee Nicole Good who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. We also mourn the 32 others that have died in ICE custody last year.

Bring your own candles or LED lights. Afterwards, we will discuss a carpool to an area mourning event in the area this weekend.

To get updates, please register here. For more events in the area see MNW Upper Charles Action Hub.

 

Climate Change Listening Session

Discussion on H.4744, "An Act relative to energy affordability, clean power and economic competitiveness

The rapidly moving bill, H.4744, would undo much of Massachusetts's progress in combating climate change as noted in Metrowest Daily News on 11/22!!!

To discuss this bill Representative James Arena-DeRosa of Holliston, Hopkinton, Sherborn, and Millis invites his constituents, in particular those who care about balancing energy affordability and the transition to clean energy, to a listening session on Saturday, January 3, 2026 at 10:00 am. Gilman Room, Holliston Public Library, 752 Washington Street.

To RSVP, please fill out this form by noon on January 2nd. Additionally, we ask that you disclose whether you would like to take two minutes to present/speak on a topic related to these issues to the group.