Several organizations have joined Voting Rights MA to endorse several bills that will help remove voting barriers for people with disabilities. Download the Voting Rights flyer (pdf).
Let your legislators know how important these bills are for everyone, and especially people with disabilities.
These efforts focus on 3 sets of bills (State House and State Senate):
- Enforcing Accessibility For Voters With Disabilities: This bill would require the Secretary of Commonwealth to arrange inspection of all polling places and early voting sites at least once every four years, to ensure compliance with federal and state disability accessibility laws. Cities and town not in compliance must take immediate action to comply and file a compliance plan, and the Attorney General can enforce compliance in court.
- Separating Voter Registration from Municipal Census: Not responding to the municipal census should no longer result in being dropped from the voting register. This change will maintain the municipal census for data collection and jury selection but no longer to change a voter’s status. Instead, voters’ names will go on the inactive list if information that they have moved from the city or town is received from the U.S. Postal Service’s national change of address program, from the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, or from official notice by another jurisdiction. Voters’ names will then continue to be removed from the inactive list if they fail to vote (or take other voting-related action) after two federal general elections.
Every year, thousands of Massachusetts voters go to vote in person, only to realize they’re classified as “inactive voters.” The primary reason is because they didn’t fill out and return their annual municipal census, an unnecessary punitive measure.
Massachusetts is an outlier. All states are required under federal law to have a process for keeping voter rolls up to date. MA is one of few to connect the inactive voter list to those who fail to fill out the municipal census. Most states just use the USPS Change of Address form and ERIC States.
This bill will keep the inactive voter list and the municipal census, both which have value. It simply decouples them ensuring better access to voters on election day and less work for local election officials. - Same Day Voter Registration: No eligible voter should be turned away at the polls due to an error in or out- of-date voter registration. Same Day Voter Registration allows all eligible voters to register or update their registration in-person on Election Day or early voting days, doing away with the longstanding and arbitrary voter registration cutoff period.
SDR is now used in 22 states and D.C.
Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire have used SDR for decades.
SDR is mostly used by voters who need to update their registration, who would otherwise be excluded from participating on Election Day