LCCR Testifies In Support of Automatic Voter Registration

LCCR staff testified this week before the Joint Committee on Election Laws in support of H4097, an automatic voter registration bill authored by Rep. Evandro Carvalho.   Recent studies have shown that 1 in 4 eligible citizens are not registered to vote, and many registrations are inaccurate because of wrong addresses or other errors.  The result is that each election cycle, millions of voters are denied the right to vote because of registration problems at the polls.  Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by these trends.

Rep. Carvalho’s bill, championed by our allies at the New Democracy Coalition, would help fix these problems by using public databases to identify eligible voters and register them instantly and automatically.  It is a technologically smart, 21st century way of tearing down barriers that currently stand in the way of voting, particularly for communities of color.  In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case, civil rights advocates are increasingly looking to state legislatures to step up and help protect voting rights.   We hope that Massachusetts will do so by enacting this important bill.

Read news coverage of our testimony here.