Voting & Democracy In The News

Diane Jeffery is president of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, but she remembers perfectly well the day she was not allowed to vote.

She was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986, doing an internship in Cambridge. She didn't know that being registered in Amherst meant nothing when she tried to vote elsewhere. A precinct worker told her to go away.

"I felt sad," she said yesterday. "I felt disenfranchised. I think this happens a lot more than we realize."

Jeffery was disenfranchised, as are thousands of would-be voters every Election Day. There is a simple solution to this, and Massachusetts lawmakers should stop dithering and enact it.

Under a bill pending in the Legislature, Massachusetts would join nearly 30 states in allowing voters to register on Election Day. With proof of address, residents could sign up and cast ballots.

While a Senate committee has sent the bill to the full body with a recommendation that it be passed, it appears to have stalled. Time matters here. If it doesn't pass by mid-June, there won't be time to implement it in time for the election in November, according to Secretary of State William Galvin.

No one seems to oppose the measure, other than a minority of town clerks whose basic beef seems to be that, heaven forbid, it would make more work for them. But no one has taken up the battle of pushing for it, either. The logical person for that role is Galvin, the state's top election official and a former legislator who has never lost his knack for pushing bills through.

But this measure has only his lukewarm support.

"I support it, assuming they have the resources to implement it," Galvin said yesterday in a telephone interview. He estimates that same-day registration would cost the state $1 million a year, based on adding two workers to each precinct in the state. That's cab fare in the context of the state budget, as Galvin well knows.

The potential impact of same-day registration is enormous. Avi Green, the executive director of MassVOTE, a nonpartisan voter advocacy group, estimates that 225,000 more people would vote if same-day registration went into effect. Galvin puts the number at anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000, saying it would have the greatest impact in presidential election years. Like this one.

"We think this would have a strong effect, with a particular emphasis on low-income folks, African-American and Latino voters," Green said.

Activists are frustrated, as well they should be. Voting is supposedly the cornerstone of our system of government, but you would never guess that from the way measures like this are kicked around. Most election reforms are forced by lawsuits.

Aside from expense, same-day registration has also been hampered by the argument that it might allow noncitizens to vote, even though there is no evidence that voter fraud is an actual problem. "There are thousands more people turned away than there are examples of voter fraud," Jeffery points out.

MassVOTE asserts that Galvin has plenty of money to fund the initiative, pointing to a federal law that gives states cash to be used to increase voter participation. Galvin insists that the money can't be applied to voter registration. He warns of an "unfunded mandate" for cities and towns.

The real issue here isn't lack of money, or fraud. It's inertia. There just isn't any sense of urgency about voting issues. The way people register and vote now has worked just fine for the people who already hold office. Why change it now? Why make it easy for people who might vote for your opponent to register?

We are in the midst of the most exciting presidential election in decades, and it doesn't seem a reach to guess that turnout in Massachusetts will be heavy. All to the good. We want people to vote in a democracy, a point that seems strangely lost on our elected officials.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com