Massachusetts could get automatic voter registration this year

5/17/2017 10:12 AM

RootsAction Team

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Oregon, California, West Virginia, Vermont, Connecticut, Alaska, and D.C. have made voter registration automatic. Massachusetts can do the same.  Share this action on Facebook  Share this action on Twitter Oregon was first to make voter registration automatic. It has now seen higher gains than any other state in actual voting by young people and by racial minorities. How many stories have you seen on how young people vote for better candidates, but fewer young people vote? More young people vote if you make registration automatic (require that people opt out, rather than requiring that they jump through hoops to opt in). Six states and the District of Columbia have now made voter registration automatic. Massachusetts could be state number 7. Thirty states are already expected to take up bills to create this reform in 2017. Click here to quickly email your Massachusetts legislators. Thirty-nine states automatically register men who get a driver's license for a military draft. They could easily allow people to register to vote. Shouldn't actual democracy be as high a priority as signing up people to kill in the name of "democracy"? Every election season, thousands of volunteers toil endless hours on a task that need not exist at all: registering voters. And people are denied the right to vote when told they are not registered. Oregon, California, West Virginia, Vermont, Connecticut, Alaska, and D.C. have made voter registration automatic, and Massachusetts is 100% capable of easily taking the same step. Click here to urge your state legislators to make voter registration automatic. With automatic voter registration, nobody is required to vote or even be registered. Rather, a government that already knows who we are through motor vehicle and other departments simply allows us to vote. (And the DMV in many states requires stricter proof of identity and citizenship than does traditional registration; and traditional registration remains available.) As a result, more people vote and candidates have to win the votes of more people. Quite possibly more candidates gain traction. It becomes easier to place initiatives on the ballot by gathering the signatures of registered voters. The state government saves the expense of the existing ridiculous system of "registering" people it already knows. "Let's get [people] on the rolls automatically and put all the resources and energy we've put into voter registration into voter education," says California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Volunteers could set aside the endless work of voter registration and instead promote the policy positions they care about. Click here to send an email to your state legislators and governor letting them know you want voter registration to be automatic. After doing this action, please forward this message to your friends. You can also share it from the webpage after taking the action yourself. -- The RootsAction.org Team P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Coleen Rowley, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others. P.P.S. This work is only possible with your financial support. Please donate. Background: > Huffington Post: One State Shows Just How Easy It Is to Get More Americans to Vote > Oregonian: Arrival of Automatic Voter Registration > Sacramento Bee: Automatic Voter Registration Sought in California > The Nation: Oregon's Radical Innovation: Make Democracy Easy > Thirty-Nine States Do Automatic Registration . . . for a Draft > Connecticut to Automatically Register 400,000 Voters    www.RootsAction.org Click here to unsubscribe and stop ALL email from RootsAction.