Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn penned an editorial for CommonWealth about the need to make recent voting reforms permanent — and to build on them with Election Day Registration. You can read an excerpt below and the full piece here.
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ON SEPTEMBER 1, Massachusetts voters broke a record. Whether by mail, by dropbox, or in person, 1.7 million voters cast a ballot for our state primaries, exceeding the previous record from 1990.
To put this into perspective, 1.7 million is approximately the same as the number of votes cast in the 2014 and 2018 state primaries—combined. And it’s more than the 2010, 2012, and 2018 state primaries combined.
We also saw more votes cast in our Democratic state primary (1,427,868) than in the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year (1,417,498), which had itself broken the record from 2008 (1,352,157).
Why did so many more people vote this year? The answer is simple: the Legislature made voting more accessible.
Mailing every active voter an application to vote by mail accomplished two important goals. First, it reminded voters that an election was even happening. (If you have ever volunteered for a campaign, you would be well aware this is one of the main hurdles to increasing engagement.) Second, it enabled voters to cast their ballot on their own timeline rather than having to figure out when during a narrow 11-hour window on September 1 they would have time to go vote.
