Chilmark is a Yankee town, no doubt about it. Some might call it behind the times, but Chilmark is quite content to preserve the quiet simplicity of the past, both in its rustic landscape and in its traditional methods of settling business and political matters.

Case in point: The hand-cranked ballot box.

Chilmark still uses one, an old-fashioned wooden box that takes hand-marked paper ballots.

But sometimes technology can catch up with a town whether it likes it or not. For at least one aspect of voting, the federal government has mandated an electronic device to replace the old paper ballots. It’s called the Automark machine, and it was introduced in Chilmark five years ago to assist visually impaired voters at town and state elections. It has been made available at every election since, at a cost of more than $1,000 per year, according to town executive secretary Timothy R. Carroll. But it has yet to be used. “It’s been sitting there ready to go, but no one has ever used it,” said Mr. Carroll this week.

The machine has a screen that magnifies ballot questions and digitizes the result. There is also an option to have the ballot questions read to the voter through headphones. “In theory we could do both of those things ourselves,” said Mr. Carroll in a discussion with the selectmen about the usefulness of the machine at their meeting Tuesday night.

Apparently in the past, Chilmark registered voters with visual impairments have chosen to vote by absentee ballot. They also have the option of having an elected official, or another person of their choice, read the ballot for them, or they may simply opt for a large-print ballot.

“The way we do our ballot, it’s clean, it’s simple,” said selectman and board chairman Frank M. Fenner Jr. “To me [the Automark system] is just another unfunded mandate.”

The system may also compromise voter anonymity. Because of the small number of voters who might potentially use the Automark system (according to Mr. Carroll, there is only one registered Chilmark voter who is visually impaired), and the difference in appearance of the ballots, it would be easy for a ballot counter to know who made the selection. In the past, the town has asked several voters to hold back until the election nears an end, just in case someone came forward needing to use the Automark machine. That way, the small group could vote on the machine as well, making it more difficult to figure out how they voted. “We try and protect the privacy of the voter,” said Mr. Carroll.

There is also a fee attached to the electronic process. According to Mr. Carroll, the town would be charged each time the ballots were digitized, and would be charged to have the results printed and returned. Software programming for the machine and the printing of the special ballot pushes the price tag up past $1,000 per year. “We brought ballot-making in-house 12 years ago,” said Mr. Carroll on Tuesday night. “We’ve been doing it at paper cost. Our town hasn’t had the appropriation in the budget [to maintain the Automark system]. It’s going to be an additional $2,000 in the budget for next year.”

Chilmark likes the old way better anyway. Enough so that the selectmen are willing to challenge the federal mandate that requires the use of the machine at every election. “It’s going to be an argument with the secretary of state’s office, and we may lose,” Mr. Carroll told the selectmen at their meeting.

But for the Jan. 19 special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, the selectmen are opting to forgo the Automark machine. “For this election, we cannot use this medium, period,” said Mr. Fenner.

“Why don’t you prepare a letter explaining what our access arrangements are and our limited utility for such a machine, and say we’ll keep it on hand if we get a number of voters that want to use it,” said selectman J.B. Riggs Parker, directing Mr. Carroll to draft a letter to the secretary of state.

But that may not be an option. According to Brian McNiff from the elections division of the office of the secretary of state, every town in the commonwealth has made the machine available during elections, and is required to do so by a federal mandate. “As far as I know, all the towns are using it.”

Come Jan. 19, make that all towns but one.