There's a battle this Town Meeting Day to bring broadband to the Northeast Kingdom.

Voters in 27 towns are going are deciding whether they want to form something called a Communication Union District, where towns share the responsibility of building, operating and maintaining infrastructure for high speed broadband.

Less than half of the addresses in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom have access to high-speed internet. This causes headaches for business owners like St. Johnsbury's Richard Smith, who relies on the internet to work with teachers on special education case management.

"I have teachers who contact me and say they're losing their connection and can't get their work done," Smith said.

Towns in the union will make a plan of what kind of broadband infrastructure to build and where to put it.

Rural towns often lack the tax base to lay down high-speed fiber cable, which can cost up to $10,000 a mile.

"Comcast is never going to run up Dexter Mountain or to West Glover or to South Albany. High-speed internet is not a luxury anymore. A lot of infrastructure runs off of high-speed internet," said Noah Armstrong, a software developer from Glover.

Being in the union lets towns apply for grants to fund the costly infrastructure. And it doesn't cost taxpayers a dime.

"There are margins. We can make this profitable. It's just not huge margins, which is one reason the corporate actors may not have been jumping on this to date," said Nick Anzalone with the group Northeast Kingdom Community Broadband.

Community leaders say education, state services, and telemedicine are all moot without adequate broadband.

For many business owners in the NEK, high-speed broadband can't come soon enough. "It's been talked about for 20 years in Vermont -- that everyone was going to have high-speed internet, but it's amazing to me that so many people still don't," Smith said.

Before the polls closed Tuesday, 23 towns had approved the measure.