With preliminary municipal elections less than a week away, a group of election reform advocates rallied outside Boston City Hall Wednesday, urging state lawmakers to take up a trio of bills they said would strengthen voting access across Massachusetts.
The bills include one that would allow for same-day voter registration, an issue that Massachusetts’ chief election official, Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin, has been advocating for publicly recently.
“With voting rights under attack by the federal government, now is the time for us to pass same-day voter registration in Massachusetts,” said state Rep. Carmine Gentile, who is sponsoring a version of the bill in the lower chamber. “In Massachusetts, we have a history of strengthening and safeguarding our democracy. Enabling everyone who has the right to vote to exercise that right on Election Day is long overdue.”
Gentile was joined by about three dozen other advocates affiliated with the civic engagement nonprofit MassVote and the Election Modernization Coalition arranged by the government accountability group Common Cause.
According to recent data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, 23 states and Washington, D.C., have implemented same-day registration, which allows any qualified resident to register to vote and cast a ballot at the same time. Twenty of those states, as well as D.C., allow registration to happen on Election Day.
Right now in Massachusetts, voters can register or make modifications to their registration as late as 10 days before an election. The idea of same-day registration almost gained traction when lawmakers enacted other election reforms in 2022, but ultimately it was left out.
“We did hear some concerns,” said Common Cause Massachusetts Executive Director Geoff Foster, noting that lawmakers at the time had questions about implementation, costs and impacts to local elections.
“I am extremely excited that Secretary Galvin has been so emphatically supportive of this reform in the last few weeks,” Foster said. “He sees local election officials and understands what they’re doing day in and day out, probably better than anyone and the fact that he’s able to say right now is the time to do it, we’re really excited about that.”
Multiple speakers said Wednesday that some 3,300 provisional ballots from Election Day 2024 were rejected, with a third of them coming from the City of Boston. Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts President Rahsaan Hall pointed to the city’s status as one of the most diverse in New England.
“What does that say about our democracy?” Hall asked, adding that advocates are seeking to ensure access for racial and ethnically diverse communities, for the transient population of students who live in Greater Boston and for “people who are living on the margins of poverty, who can’t afford to stay long-term in one location but are very concerned and interested and invested” in local elections.
“They should not be a part of that 33% because of an arbitrary cutoff,” Hall continued. “We need to make sure that we are focusing on Boston. That is why we are here at the steps of City Hall, to underscore the point.”
Another bill would separate voter registration from a municipal census, a policy that Hall noted affected him one year when he missed the census.
“Now that’s me, someone with an aptitude and focus towards civic engagement,” he said. “Think about all of the people who, they think voting is important, but they’re not gonna take the time or the steps to go through all of that because of the complications of life. We need to decouple that municipal census from the voter registration rolls.”
The shift to same-day registration and the decoupling of voter registration from the municipal census could present an additional challenge for Boston, which is undergoing multiple changes while under state receivership managed by Galvin’s office. Advocates said they’re confident officials can still make these reforms.
“Aside from a few administrative issues in the City of Boston, they have demonstrated their ability to execute elections, and so I think the added scrutiny will be helpful,” Hall said.
The third bill the group promoted Wednesday would enforce accessibility for voters with disabilities by mandating the secretary of state’s office conduct polling accessibility check-ups every four years to ensure compliance with applicable federal and state laws.
The group is scheduled to testify about their bills before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Election Laws on Sept. 16 at 1 p.m.
