Walpole seems to be a place that won’t take no or yes for an answer. The town has had three elections in less than a year, all of them related to a Proposition 2 1/2 override and all of them bitter. The long-running political drama may have finally reached a conclusion on March 16, when four pro-override selectmen survived recall attempts. But then again, the next regular election is only two months away.

You don’t have to live in town to find out the latest plot twist. Thanks to the bulletin boards on a privately funded Web site, www.walpole.org, anyone can get a taste of New England town politics at its most spirited. The site provides a home for what is essentially a town meeting without limits, where a resident can log on at 3 a.m. to type in a retort after stewing over someone else’s opinion for a few hours. Even on February 5, when the rest of the state was obsessed with the victory rally for the New England Patriots, the override mess was still the hot topic on walpole.org, engendering such comments as “Maybe you really don’t care about the truth!” and “Go ahead, insult me. You only demean yourself.”

Walpole.org was set up in 1998 by Gerry Nelson, a Web designer who moved into town in 1990. The site’s relationship with local government has been uneasy: The board of selectmen voted to delete a link from the town’s official Web site (http://www.walpole.ma.us) last June. After some residents complained, the town relented, but not completely; now there’s a link to a page that gives you the address of walpole.org, but you have to type it into your browser yourself.

According to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, about half of the state’s 351 municipalities have official Web sites, but almost none allows citizens to post comments there for other surfers to see. A far smaller number have unofficial sites set up by citizens, and they vary widely in quality and tone. Walpole.org is one of the most impressive-looking, crammed with ads and features such as “today in Walpole history.” And it professes neutrality in town politics. “I have a personal stand, but not a stand that the site will promote,” Nelson says.

But other unsanctioned sites are more adversarial. The Peabody Citizens for Better Government (http://www.pcbg.net), for instance, has been a thorn in the side of new Mayor Michael Bonfanti, posting comments critical of his inauguration speech before he finished delivering it. The Rev. Raymond Phyles, chairman of the civic group, even ridiculed Bonfanti for grammatical errors in the “greetings” letter on City Hall’s official Web site. (“The excessive use of capitalization throughout also makes the letter look like it is written in German instead of English.”) At the other end of the continuum is the non-confrontational www.westboroughma.com, which conducts polls on such topics as “Which of the following Westborough celebrities would you most like to learn more about?” (The winner was cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney, which received 17 of the total 41 votes cast.)

The people of Walpole are not necessarily grouchier than the citizens of Westborough, but the protracted fights over the Proposition 2 1/2 override have been enough to try anyone’s patience. The $3.7 million property-tax hike–which will cost the average Walpole household $670 this year, according to the Neponset Valley Daily News–first went before voters on June 2 and lost by a clear, if not overwhelming, margin (3,856 to 3,517). About half of the town’s 15,055 voters cast ballots. This verdict stood only until July 17, when the board of selectmen voted 4-1 to put the question back on the ballot on September 11, a day when Walpole took part in a special congressional election to replace the late Joe Moakley and terrorists taking off from Logan Airport attacked New York City and Washington, DC. This time, with considerably higher turnout (about 68 percent), the override passed narrowly, by a vote of 5,259 to 4,975.

Many override opponents refused to accept this as the final result, logging onto walpole.org to demand another vote. On October 5, someone with the tag Anonymous went on walpole.org to ask, “You can vote again and again until you get the results you want? Then you stop it? How undemocratic. But that is what the ‘yes’ vote crowd did.” A respondent named Madison shot back, “It took four years and defeat after defeat after defeat over the ratification by the states of our United States Constitution before it was finally passed.”

Though selectmen requested the override for general operating expenses, many walpole.org posters focused on the schools. On October 10, Elizabeth Ann Bardsley Cordoza wrote, “Hey, the Override was DEFEATED in June; but that wasn’t a clear enough message for those determined to ram a tax increase down the throats of long-time residents on fixed incomes…Frankly, I haven’t used a dime of the educational services provided by the Walpole School Department since June 1964. However, I recently retired after nearly thirty years in education (the last twenty in Special Education); and my husband and I never (by choice) had any children. I’m sick and tired of paying to educate everyone else’s children but we always figured it was our duty as citizens.”

That kind of argument elicited the following from I.V.Y., who feared that if the town had to start cutting expenses, it would start with school buses: “Exactly how long do you believe that the question should have stayed off the ballot? Long enough for my 3rd grader to walk 1.2 miles home from school all winter long? Long enough for some child walking home to be hit by a car?…Or do you think that it should have NEVER been put on the ballot again?”

By early last month, Nelson says, about 800 computer users per day visited walpole.org. “There is no other venue where people can anonymously express their opinions on town issues,” he points out. Of course, some of the site’s visitors are simply checking out the youth soccer league’s schedule, or scanning the classified ads for used cars or baby sitters.

Despite much agitation on walpole.org, override opponents have not been able to win a third vote on the issue. However, they did collect the 1,500 signatures needed to force a recall election singling out the four selectmen who approved the September 11 election. All of the targeted selectmen survived the March 16 vote, in which voter turnout fell back to about 50 percent. The closest result was for Judy Conroy, who beat the recall by a vote of 3,948 to 3,595.

The next day, both sides were still at it on walpole.org, with Brown Bear warning, “Having come within five hundred votes of losing their elected positions, I hope the Selectmen will be chastened” and Qwerty mocking the recall forces for the failure of their “frantic 6+ months effort.” Anyone who feared that the override debate would finally die down could take comfort in Smokey’s reminder that the entire board of selectmen will face the voters again in June: “We still have another chance.”