 Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to tonight's presentation, the state of voting, expanding access and addressing barriers. I'm sure many of us have heard the news of legislation across the nation that is being proposed to change the way people in our country are able to access ballot boxes. I wanted to be able to address this issue with the community by inviting two panelists to join us tonight. We are lucky enough tonight to be able to hear from Jessica Jones Capral and Evan Horowitz. Jessica Jones Capral is the policy and legislative affairs senior manager at the League of Women Voters United States where she works to deliver the league's message around federal advocacy priorities through lobbying and the development of advocacy strategies. Jessica is an expert on league policy positions and works to implement grassroots strategies in coordination with league members and organizational partners around the country. When not working to defend democracy and empower voters, she can be found in Washington DC with her husband, their five-month-old son, and their dog Lily. Jessica, thank you so much for joining us tonight. We are also joined tonight by Evan Horowitz, the executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tisch College Tufts, a research organization that analyzes live policy issues in Massachusetts. He has been the quick study columnist and resident data journalist for the Boston Globe. He also wrote 538 NBC's Think and The Washington Post and briefly served as a fill-in host for WBUR's Radio Boston. In the bygone past, Evan was a professor of English literature at Stanford, Harvard, Brandeis, Princeton, and the University of North Texas. He also attended the quarter on blue where he learned a set of French cooking techniques that he now uses to keep his family happy at dinner time. Thank you Evan so much for joining us tonight. Before we move on, I would like to Evan will turn on this camera when it's his turn to present. Thank you for asking. I want to thank our sponsors for tonight's event, the League of Women Voters Arlington for helping us get the word out about this program and the Arlington Libraries Foundation for supporting civics education programming for the community. I also want everyone to know that this program is being recorded tonight and will be aired on ACMI as well on the library's webpage. You'll be able to find it there. Thank you so much and just want to let everyone know this evening is being presented as a panel. We're going to hear from Jessica first, then we're going to hear from Evan, and then we're going to open up the room for questions. You are welcome to enter questions either in the chat or in the Q&A feature and I will address those questions at the end of the session. We'll save them for then. So without further ado, I want to turn the floor over to you Jessica and really looking forward to learning more about the national situation of this national state of voting. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Ina. I'm so happy to be here with you all for this event. As Ina said, I do work with the League of Women Voters in the National Office in Washington DC. Every day the league works to empower voters and defend democracy through advocacy, education, and voter service activities. Through our leagues in all 50 states and in DC and in over 700 communities across the country, we protect and educate millions of people every election cycle to ensure that they can participate at the ballot box. The league played a major role in the 2020 elections protecting voters and providing them with the information they needed to vote. Through our election website vote411.org, the league reached over 6 million voters wanting information like where do I vote, what do I bring with me, how do I register to vote and more. We also protected more than 25 million voters through our election related litigation to expand absentee excuses, wave witness requirements and establish or enhance notice and cure processes for ballots flagged for rejection. In 2020 the league also made history and celebrated two significant milestones. First, the 100th anniversary since our founding in February, and then the 100th anniversary since the ratification of the 19th amendment. I think in order to understand the current voting rights landscape, we first have to look back at the last election. The 2020 election cycle was unlike anything we have seen before. It was a generation defining public health crisis that affected nearly every voter, causing dramatic shifts in the way that Americans could safely exercise their right to vote. An unprecedented strain was placed on local governments, elections officials and community groups working to engage and empower voters with while widespread miss and disinformation efforts threatened to discourage voter participation. Some officials use their power positions of power to limit, not expand voters access, leading to voter suppression in multiple states. The slowdowns and service limitations of the US Postal Service also caused ballot delivery delays to voters and then back to elections offices. States modified elections requirements and rules for casting absentee ballots. The Congress failed to pass legislation that would provide billions of dollars of funding to local elections officials so that they could properly respond to the changes necessary to keep poll workers, elections officials and voters safe on election day. Now those were the problems, but despite the constant challenges to voter registration and voting the 2020 election actually had the highest voter turnout of the 20th century. For the US Census Bureau, 17 million more people voted in a 2020 election than in the last presidential election in 2016. Hispanic, black and Asian voters turned out at higher levels. Voting rates are higher in 2020 than in 2016 across all age groups. More women turned out than men and they also turned out at a higher rate than in 2016. The 2020 election showed us how resilient voters were and how excited and motivated they were to participate in casting their ballots. The 2020 legislative cycle shows us how motivated legislators are now to ensure that the people who did participate, those people who made history by showing up to exercise their right to vote, don't get to do so again. This 2020 backlash is in response to false accusations about voter fraud and election irregularities, and they are rooted in racism. This year alone, we've seen around 400 anti voter bills and 47 states introduced by state legislators. Some have even been signed by governors and enacted into law. Nearly half of the restrictive voting bills take aim at absentee voting, a practice that was heavily used in 2020 in response to the ongoing pandemic. Access to absentee or mail-in ballots has always been traditionally used by older Americans who either because of age or health have voted from a safety of their own homes for elections for decades. With the expansion of absentee and mail ballots extending beyond those traditional voters to communities of color, we're seeing a retraction in those laws. Until the 2020 election, it was hard to determine what the partisan split was in which party use mail-in voting more. Attempts to restrict or limit access to absentee and mail-in ballots are an attempt to shrink the electorate and limit access to the ballot box. Although for the most part, these laws have come in the form of limiting applications for absentee ballots. Legislation in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida have even gone as far to prohibit local elections officials from sending ballot applications to all voters. A practice that was regular in the 2020 election. In Arizona, where they have the permanent early voter list, lawmakers enacted changes that can remove thousands of voters who automatically receive a ballot for every election in which they're eligible to vote. States have also moved in 2020 to enact stricter photo ID requirements. Proponents of voter ID laws claim that voting with an ID will tamp down on voter fraud. But there are very few instances of voter fraud actually occurring across the country, if any. There's a higher chance of actually being struck by lightning than a finding someone who is impersonating someone else at the poll booth. Voter ID laws disproportionately impact communities of color. Younger voters, especially students and older voters who lack driver's license or the identifying paperwork that needed and required in voter ID law. These laws also suppressed turnout by purposely preventing people from turning up to the polls or preventing others from showing up in the first place. Following the 2020 election laws in Arizona and Georgia were applied to early voting and absentee voting requiring voters to send in copies of their ID with their request form. In a digital age that we have all become so accustomed to this would prevent even someone as tech savvy as myself from requesting a ballot to vote from home. Additional restrictive legislation purges, which are cancels the registration of voters from the voting rules if they don't vote. It also they also rollback laws that allow voters to register to vote on election day, often called same day registration. And these laws threaten the ability of groups like the League of Women voters to register voters at events in public spaces, or with local registrars. And finally, additional laws rollback automatic voter registration systems which are meant to simply enroll someone to vote. And while there have been nearly 400 of these pieces of restrictive legislation that have been introduced, very few have actually been signed into law. So some good news. Legislation has been passed and signed by governors in Georgia and Florida and Iowa, Arizona and Arkansas, and there are other states where it's trying to move before legislative sessions and now for some more good news, because it's not all bad. In fact, twice as many bills to expand voting have been introduced as those that have been introduced to limit voting. And nine of those bills have been signed into law. So more expanding expanded voting laws have been enacted than restrictive. And I don't want to dip into the work that Evan will talk about but one of those expansive voting bills was passed here in Massachusetts. Completing the way with the greatest number of expansive voting bills include New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey. Bills in six states would extend or create no excuse absentee voting, making reforms in these states that were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic permanent. And 11 states would require that voters be notified of and given an opportunity to to cure absentee ballot defects, in some cases, even after election day. Bills in seven states would create or expand access to permanent absentee voting lists, like the one I mentioned in Arizona previously. Bills in these lists would automatically receive an absentee ballot for every election without having to reapply forever at every election. Bills in 15 states would expand voter registration opportunities, including by offering online voter registration and providing same day or an election day registration. Bills in three states would be registration of 16 year olds and extending voter registration deadlines. And finally, establishing and expanding automatic voter registration. Bills in five states would establish automatic voter registration. And then bills in three states would establish or expand election day or same day registration. Bills in 15 states are an omnibus bill with multiple provisions and then there are some bills in some states that are just a single provisions. And 10 states have seen movement on bills to restore voting rights to people with past convictions. And one of those bills was actually signed in Washington. Other voting bills offer better access to those with disabilities by designating someone to assist them in marking their ballots. And still others extend no excuse absentee voting or create early in person voting, allowing voters to cast their ballots prior to election day, and a designated early voting site. And other new laws expand automatic voter registration agencies so that more people have the opportunity to become registered. And not just all about legislation in the states, either. Congress has actually introduced a once in a generation bill called the for the people act. Number is HR one and S one in the respective chambers. The for the people act focuses on four overarching areas of democracy reform. It will include expanding voter access and participation, ending the dominance of big money in politics, establishing independent redistricting commissions and every state, and enacting ethical standards and accountability for all branches of government. The historic piece of legislation passed the house earlier this spring, and it's actually been heard and committee in the Senate, and the rules committee went through a markup earlier this month. We expect there to be floor action around this legislation in the Senate, and the very near future. The for the people act also addresses anti voter legislation by creating national standards for voting. And other people act will promote voter access by expanding early voting availability. It will require that voters not have to wait in lines longer than 30 minutes to vote. And it'll create universal automatic voter registration systems, and it'll require same day registration. It will also place limits on how states can purge voter roles, enact campaign finance laws like establishing a small dollar donor programs and in partisan gerrymandering by creating independent redistricting commissions in every state. The creation of these national standards for federal elections would support virtually all state level anti voter bills. The other piece of legislation and I want that hasn't been introduced yet, but I think is very is very important and very close to my heart is the John Lewis voting rights advancement act. The John Lewis voting rights advancement act will restore the voting rights act. In 2013 shall be the holder decision and ensure that every voter, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or what language they speak has equal access to the ballot box and is protected from unfair laws and practices that make it more difficult to vote. And it'll do this by establishing a new pre clearance formula that looks at past voting rights laws and history passed by legislative legislatures or local election officials, and bring states under a pre clearance umbrella so that any, any laws have to be pre cleared by the Department of Justice before they go into effect. And this will help cut down on laws that are meant to discriminate meant to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters and those with other disabilities. It'll also redefine what a voting rights act voting rights violation is. So it really addresses this shall be be the holder decision, where the Supreme Court said that it wasn't taking into account new information and taking was using an old outdated formula. And it'll establish a national notification system, ensuring that if any law goes into effect that voters have to know about what what what the law is, how it affects them and how it affects where they go to vote. Before the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act cannot reverse state bills. It actually will respond to future laws by restoring the pre clearance for changes, protecting and empowering voters and responding to that 2013 Supreme Court decision and Shelby County versus Holder that eviscerated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The passage of these two laws go hand in hand. We cannot trade one for the other, as has been recently suggested by a few senators. If we want to honor honor the life of Congressman John Lewis, we must pass both of them. There's about 300 pages of legislation within the For the People Act that's called the Voter Empowerment Act. And as a key piece of legislation that Congressman Lewis wrote when he wrote and advocated for for several years. So we must pass both of them if we want to continue to honor his legacy. The VRAA, like I said, it hasn't been introduced yet. The VRAA is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And that it hasn't been introduced yet because Congress is working to us to collect evidence that would protect it in the future. And would help us continue to establish the need for the Voting Rights Act and gather evidence in states across the country of bad laws so that we can establish a need for the legislation. So we want to keep all these bills together and keep them moving forward. And the League of Women Voters has an action alert on our website. And we encourage you to contact your senators as this bill moves forward. Even if you think that your senators are supportive of it or if they have already signed on as co-sponsors and I can tell you that both of yours have. It's important to continue to support them in their co-sponsorship of this legislation. We want to make sure that folks are hearing from their constituents about why they should continue to support it so that they can feel happy and justified in their decision to continue working on this bill moving forward. Finally, it's not exactly voting rights related, but there's another lead piece of legislation connected to DC statehood. DC state establishing DC statehood would ensure that democracy is applied to everyone across the country for the 700,000 people in DC, we do not have voting rights in Congress. We have a representative who is allowed to run a committee and but she doesn't have a vote on the floor and we do not have senators. So if you could call your senators for me and let them know that you support DC statehood, I would really appreciate it so that I would have full rights as an of the full rights of an American citizen. The redistricting is starting soon. I know that many in the league are working on redistricting and fighting to ensure that there's fair representation all across communities for everyone. So please make sure to pay attention as this process starts both at the local and state levels and for your federal representatives. And with that, I'll take a break and hand it over to Evan. I mean, it's so interesting to hear about things going on around the country. I'm so focused on events here in Massachusetts. My name is Evan Horowitz. I run the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tisch College, Tufts University. We do nonpartisan research on live legislative issues, policy issues in Massachusetts, including ballot questions. So that's what I'm going to be focused on election voting access, voting rights and the state of the contemporary debate here in Massachusetts. We tend to think of ourselves as a pretty progressive state, and we have a super majority democratic control in the legislature. So we're, but as it turns out, we're far from the cutting edge when it comes to voting practices and outcomes. I'll start with two kind of basic measures there. So, think of the share of eligible folks who are registered to vote, and the share. Oh, I see that some people are noting that my camera isn't working. So that's as much as I can do on my end, I think. But if anyone can feel free to jump in and give me technical advice if that's useful. Two core measures. So think of the total population of people who are eligible to vote, right, adults. What share of them are registered to vote and what share actually vote. Massachusetts is not at the top and either try turning it off and on is the message I'm seeing so I have done this. I will do this again, this video off video on someone to send a note that made a difference. No, I could disconnect and reconnect. Sure. So I'm going to try to do so I will pick up I'm going to leave and come back and I will try to pick up where I left off. Thank you everyone so much for bearing with us again I'm looking so much forward to having programming back in the community room in the Robbins at some point in the future. I, when we came on to test our tech before the presentation Evan's camera was working perfectly so let's hope you can get that working again when he turns that back on again. Again, thank you so much for bearing with us. This is a very. Oh great here we go. Ah, well this time I'm visible. So you can see my smiling face. And I guess I shouldn't repeat all the words I said because I'm hopefully I was audible before. But I'll talk about sort of two core measures for how you can think about how well Massachusetts is doing in terms of enabling access to vote. So one would be share of eligible folks who are registered and other would be shared eligible folks who actually vote, and we don't, we do okay but not great on either measure we're 27th among states in terms of registered voters as a percentage of all eligible voters so that means 26 states have a higher share of eligible people who are actually registered. We do a little bit better than that, in terms of the number who vote. And already voting it's again a kind of mixed picture, white residents are more likely to be registered and more likely to vote than any other group. We do relatively well so top five among states in terms of the share of Hispanic residents who are registered, and that translates into a relatively high number of Hispanic residents who vote. But we do worse in terms of black voters who are registered as a percentage of voters and also black voters who vote in fact we're in the bottom 10 states there. For now, we have the same basic kind of quasi dysfunctional turnout dynamics which is to say older residents vote at higher rates, turnout for presidential elections dwarfs turnout for midterms, which dwarfs turnout for off cycle elections like Boston mayor or any primaries. And there are policy reasons for some of these things perhaps the best example is the lack of same day registration or election day registration which Jessica mentioned is one of the few innovations that has really been proven to boost turnout in elections. You don't have to register in advance you show up on election day you say you know what I forgot to register but I really want to vote. And as a mechanism to allow you to vote and have your vote counted. We don't do that in Massachusetts you have to register well in advance. Despite years of advocacy in that direction. I still think the, perhaps the best way to understand the current policy dynamics around voting in Massachusetts is to look at the last 18 months, which saw two voting related policy battles. One about coven and voting from home. The other about the ballot question for rank choice voting. So I'm going to take those one at a time, give some background, talk through the main issues in each case, which I hope will illuminate broader patterns. So let's start with the coven and voting from home. So when coven hit it quickly became clear that elections had to be rethought and very quickly, because while it's true that the lockdown started in March and April of last year. There were going to be elections well before November we had special elections we had municipal elections we had primaries all through the spring and summer. So when the lockdown vote from home and voting by mail seemed the obvious choice, but there's a problem. The Massachusetts state constitution imposes strict limits on absentee ballots and vote by mail. It says that there are three ways I'll come back to this because this is now a contested point but at the time it didn't seem like a contested point seemed like a well established one. Anyway, it says that there are three ways to qualify for absentee ballot, one to be out of town to have a disability that keeps you from voting at your polling place. Three to have a religious belief that prevents you from voting at your polling place. And if you can't claim one of these three particular exemptions, you cannot get an absentee ballot. It's not a law that's in the state constitution. It's not enough to argue that voting for home boost equity, or is vital to an effective democracy. You've got to change the constitution again we'll come back to this because that's increasingly a contested position. So, at the time the legislature fought it over, and decided to simply declare that coven created a disability for all residents in everyone could claim an absentee ballot under that second excuse. Having a disability that made it impossible to reach the polls. So everyone was de facto eligible to vote absentee, and that worked for last year. I mean, I assume many of you voted absentee there was a huge increase in the number of people who voted vote by vote by mail. But notice it's not a permanent solution and it depends on the viability of this sort of de facto creation de facto declaration that everyone has a disability due to coven. It's incredibly popular but it's not clear it will be even available in 2022. Now people are working on this advocates are pushing on two fronts. First, in a bill generally referred to as the as the votes act which is principally dedicated to keeping the coven era rules in place. A big part of that is vote by mail, and the provision I just talked about continuing viability vote by mail continuing acceptability vote by mail for those who don't have one of the three listed excuses. There's also more early voting, easier registration process for mailing of an application number of other changes that were implemented last year that enhanced access to vote with stuff like that. But you can see the problem right away, if the Constitution dictates three acceptable excuses for absentee voting, what's the excuse going to be in future, once COVID fades as a primary excuse. So, this is the second front right now, which is building a legal case that the old understanding of the Constitution is wrong, that the idea that there are only three acceptable excuses is a misreading of the Constitution and that in fact, a broader vote by mail permission is possible. This is not a settled issue this is probably going to end up being litigated, but it's a growing legal theory. That's part of it then there's the Secretary of State, I'll refer to him as the Secretary of State though I think definitely is the Secretary of the Commonwealth, who has been surreptitiously let's say expanding absentee voting for some time, despite the constitutional provision, and I should be clear that even as a critique is just an explanation. So, we have this, this parallel system of absentee voting in Massachusetts, that's called early vote by mail, and it came into existence in a very strange way, which has led to some benefits but also some trouble. And then Massachusetts first introduced early voting so this goes back seven or eight years. The Secretary realized that it created an opportunity for a kind of quasi absentee. So, even if you can't get an absentee ballot for the regular election unless you have one of those excuses, maybe you could get an absentee ballot for the early election. And then the excuse list didn't apply anybody could get an absentee ballot for the early election but of course the early elections really the same as the main election so it doesn't matter. So for any election in which there was early voting, you could get a no excuse absentee ballot, and some people did. It's called early no excuse for early vote by mail. So what this is, well, as you can see it's kind of a hack and kind of a workaround. It's never been challenged so it hasn't been affirmed by the courts as constitutionally acceptable, and it's hard to publicize because too much publicity could invite a challenge. So that is ongoing, and it's not clear whether we'll keep two parallel systems or eliminate one of these. There are legal and theoretical issues around vote by mail but let's get back to last year. Once we decided to allow vote by mail. Remember by by saying that basically everyone in the state had the right to vote by mail by dint of a disability excuse from coded. The next question was, how are we going to do this, because as a state we're not really set up to process millions of vote by mail applications and balance. If you go against the second unique challenge of the Massachusetts voting system, it's town by town. In most places, most states around the country, voting is handled at the county level, right, it's counties who organize elections and handle ballot printing things like that. We don't have county governance in Massachusetts and we have vestiges of county governance but we don't have robust county governance and they certainly don't handle election challenges individual cities and towns have to get ballots printed. Handle application, remember the ballots can vary town by town, they have to handle applications, and that's totally infeasible in a year when you're trying to manage millions of remote ballots ruled by mail ballots. We needed a lot more centralization, which in practice needed to be organized by the Secretary of State's office. But the Secretary of State is an elected official, not an appointed one, we vote for the Secretary of State in Massachusetts. So the governor can't say, do this, you're the, you know, run the election this way. You know, as the governor I, I think we have to do this way. The Secretary has his own purview and has strong feelings about how to handle remote balloting, which resulted in a second fight over whether to send ballots to all eligible residents. So once the state said, you know what, everybody can vote from home. Everybody has that right this year, because COVID creates this universal disability exception. Well, does that mean everybody has to go and apply to vote, or how do they get a ballot. So one possibility would be, well you just, you know, we just get the ballots and we send everybody a ballot. We send everybody a ballot to that right to their house or right to their home. We have addresses for the voting rolls and let them fill them out and send them in. And this, the Secretary didn't like this idea. He's not the only one of the lots of people who are concerned that this created opportunities for fraud. You know, a lot of ballots out in the wild, what was going to happen to these ballots what if someone, you know, collected hundreds of them and tried to submit them to fraud, or even if there wasn't fraud, what if someone used the avail wide availability of these real ballots to stage examples of fraud, and therefore undermine the perceptions of the integrity of the election. So the alternative is to, instead of sending everyone a ballot, send everyone an application. Right, you don't get about what you get is an application to apply for a ballot that you can fill out at home. And that's what we ended up doing. And the nice thing about this also logistically, is that, while ballots are different town by town city by city so really hard to kind of centrally print out millions of ballots and send them out, the applications are not that different. So it's a lot easier to centrally print out the applications, and then send those out, and then have those filter through the towns for specific ballots. And that's what happened and it went pretty well from a logistical perspective. Things got printed ballots got distributed votes got counted without any major scandals so there was a lawsuit by some Republican groups to challenge the legitimacy of the COVID related changes, but it's not being taken particularly seriously thus far. The future of all this is totally up in the air, in terms of voting rules that will rain when the pandemic is officially over. Again, because it's just not clear what the Constitution will permit, and what legislators will pursue. And that was one of the voting related fights over the last year. The other was about rank choice voting. So, this was a proposed change to the way people vote in Massachusetts that appeared as a ballot question in 2020 you may remember it if you voted in 2020. Like most ballot questions I should say, it was considered by the legislature first but not passed. That's typically how questions get to the ballot first you pursue it through the legislature. And if you fail then you go directly to the people you try to mount a ballot campaign. And it keeps like this it really tells you something I mean one thing we know for sure about current legislators is that they do pretty well under the current rules for all they got elected. So, they're not especially eager to change those rules, which is, which helps explain why it's difficult to get voting rules altered through the legislature, and why they occasionally end up on the ballot. Anyway, the way rank choice works, the basic setup is you rank candidates, instead of saying, I'm voting for this person and not that person, you can say, I like this person best and this person second best and this person third best and this person fourth best. And you do that for every election, you know, the governor's election and Secretary of State's election lieutenant governor, you can rank. And the proponents of this made credible arguments about a whole set of potential benefits around this approach when we have towns that do it already. Cambridge does it for a number of elections. So this approach does a better job of aggregating people's real preferences. Particularly blunt strategic voting so a lot of people feel when they go into vote that maybe they have a preferred candidate but they're afraid that candidate won't get a lot of votes so they'll be they'll be throwing their vote away if they vote for that particular candidate. I think a lot of people have felt this, I really feel drawn to this person but I'm concerned that I'll be throwing my vote away if I vote for them and therefore I won't do that. And I think that's ranked choice that doesn't come up. You just list that person first, and you list someone you think is more viable second. And if it turns out that the person who lists first really isn't viable, then your vote gets transferred. It works beautifully that way. So your vote will continue to get transferred down the line until it ends up with attached to a viable candidate. Another is that ranked choice creates sort of clearer winners in large pools and we had a congressional primary in 2020, where the winner got 22% of the vote. That's a very small percentage of the vote right it's possible that maybe 25% of the people in the district actually like that person, but they really liked them. Whereas the rest of the candidates were preferred by a huge majority of people but they split the vote. And this happens in, you know, in first pass the post elections like that one where the person with the most votes wins even if they get 8% or 12% or 22% or whatever it is. The final sort of advantage to talk about is it makes candidates more civil but there are risks to associated with ranked choice including the added complexity and possible problems with the state constitution. And I don't want to talk for too long about the merits because it didn't pass and it's not going to happen at least the way that champions of that ballot measure hoped. Again, the Secretary of State played a role here as the chief organizer of election logistics. He emphasized during the run up to the to the ballot that this change to rank choice will require a whole lot of logistical changes, including new machines and centralized counting, which means shipping ballots around and you think about this. One thing in a state like ours where I was talking about we have so much of our election infrastructure handled at the city or town level, where even accounts happen at the precinct level so you're in a precinct. At the end of the day, you tally up your votes, you count the numbers, and then you send the numbers along to, well, either centrally, or up the chain to your town with rank choice you can't do that. You have to get all the ballots together in one place, or at least all the information on those ballots together in one place. So you can go through this counting pros multi level counting process, and that's logistically more complicated. But the bigger issue, and this is why I really, this is the reason I'm really telling this part of the story turned out to be unexpected partisan pushback. So, there's nothing inherently partisan about running choice voting. It doesn't obviously benefit one party. It's not pro Democrat or pro Republican, at least in any sort of clear and obvious way, and yet opposition to the ballot question split almost entirely on partisan lines. And the ultimate vote for rank choice looked like the presidential vote and I'm going to show you a map but the if you if you look at a map of the results from that question from question to it was question to about last year. You'll see that the tally, the geographic layout of the tally looked very much like the standard Democratic Republican split around the state. More Republican areas voted against it or Democrat areas voted for it, and more moderate areas broke against it which is why it ultimately went down. That is weird though, because it doesn't seem to be a partisan issue. And it's not inevitable either the other ballot question, question one which was right to repair, didn't look like that the vote tally didn't have that geographic shape. It didn't turn into a partisan issue so not everything turns into a partisan issue but election related things seem to right rank choice voting which is usually imagined as a wonky technocratic reform got painted and understood as a progressive reform. And once that happened, it lost support from conservatives and for moderates. So, let me see if I can solve the takeaway from these two stories. So five points five point takeaways. First, the future of Massachusetts voting is totally up in the air in terms of whether people will be able to vote by mail. And that is both a political fight and a legal fight that is ongoing. To the Secretary of State has a lot of authority over election related policy in Massachusetts. The fact that Massachusetts elections are run by our 351 cities and towns makes it harder to coordinate and implement changes. For everything is partisan, even if it doesn't seem that way at first. Five final note this actually isn't a takeaway from the two stories, but it's something that I couldn't fit in otherwise and really wanted to say, which is that Massachusetts is sitting on a pot of about 40 million free federal dollars for election infrastructure upgrades, which we haven't used and when I say haven't used. I don't mean like we haven't used in a couple of months even though we've had access to it. I mean haven't used in 20 years, even though we've had access to it. And the money that the state got access to in the early 2000s as part of the help America vote act, and most every other state has already spent either all or the majority of their share. Massachusetts has not we have a huge amount of money which could be dedicated to meaningful election related infrastructure changes that could improve access. And yeah, just to say it's sitting there waiting for the right plan. I think I will stop there and I guess we'll go to questions. Yeah, we are going to go to some questions and again I invite you to enter questions either in the chat or the q amp a either one will work for us fine. Before we start to see some questions from the audience. First of all, thank both of you so much. I definitely learned a lot. This question is kind of a question for both of you. I, one of the things that I think that I really have seen a lot in the past few years is how different voting is in both different towns in Massachusetts and across the country. I'm interested to hear a little bit more about ways, and both of you address this a little bit. Just when you were talking about standards in voting national standards and voting, and Evan you to kind of address this when you're talking about how different towns are voting is based in our towns and I was wondering if you can kind of address that issue how do we assign from national legislation to bring standards what do we do that somebody in Georgia doesn't stand in the line for 10 hours, I live in a district, I live in Boston, I vote in a polling place that have very high turnout in Boston, where I do like to say Boston's favorite sport is actually not the Celtics not the Red Sox it's voting. And yet we do, I've never stood in the line, never. And I'm just wondering if what else can we do to support bringing more equity to voting across the country. Jessica, do you want to go first. Sure. Um, I mean, I think, aside, aside from passing the for the people act, there's, there's not much that we can do and it's actually really nutty that we have elections that are administered differently and in so many ways and you know that you can go to one township or one city to one county and have different elections laws. So really, I think we want to have those things universalized we really need bills like the for the people act or the voter empowerment act things like the automatic voter registration act which would establish automatic voter registration and every city and jurisdiction and state across the country. And that's, you know, I mean, it's a job of Congress to regulate federal elections. And that's the power that they have and if they lead the way on those things then then it will get done but you know, on the flip side of that, we often see good voting laws and good voting expansion start at the local level and gain momentum across the country. So it could be some, you know, something outside of federal legislation it could be as simple as you know, getting your local election administrators to use automatic voter registration to use same day registration to expand absentee. And hopefully those things will percolate up up to the federal level and then become the law of the land eventually. You know, at the very kind of granular local level. There are good reasons to make sure to give cities and towns a lot of authority to set rules and approaches over their own jurisdictions they they know their people they they have a good sense of their needs they're very close to their communities. And you know the sort of general framework here in Massachusetts has been well, the legislature sets basic standards that towns have to live up to. But they could go further with those standards and they could also, I mean the key thing is to make sure everybody has the money, essentially there's really a money issue to allow for ample access to vote right so sometimes it really is expensive to keep places open, have coworkers, whatever you have to make sure that communities can afford it and that really is a state responsibility more than a community responsibility. The other thing is it helps to set consistent standards for the purposes of marketing right so one thing we did in the state. When we set up early voting this, as I said this goes back some right years was we said well you have to be open at least this number of hours and at least this number of days for at least this period of time. And that's okay but it's really hard then for the state to say, look your polls will be open the Tuesday before at 4pm, because we don't know that every town is going to make slightly different decisions. It's much better if you say, all polls have to be open at least these hours, exact hours the exact days then you can say then you can run information campaigns and say, wherever you are, you can go to your you can go vote after work on this Tuesday, every town will have their voting who's open after work on this Tuesday, a week before election day. So some standardization has to be considered in light of that and that it's very hard to get information to certain voters I mean they're, they're a huge class of low information voters that are really hard to reach, but whose votes count like everybody else's and you know who are Americans like everybody else and should be empowered to get to the polls. And the easier you make it for those people, the better and that includes getting consistent information. Great, thank you. We had a question from the audience about that 40 million that Evan mentioned, who decides how that money gets spent why has it been sitting there for almost 20 years, and what kind of infrastructure, can we hope to see. So, it's an interesting story about why it's been sitting there for 20 years. I think the important thing to realize is that, well, the Secretary of State has a lot of discretion for requesting the use of that of those funds. So I think, for a long time, there was a kind of deference to the Secretary of State, various to say, Listen, we're waiting for the right plan for the use of this money you oversee the election systems you know what's needed. Let's put together a plan, and the promise has been that a plan is forthcoming. And then it sort of never happened or smaller plans happened to have been number so model plans we've made smaller draws on that money. But the legislature has kind of deferred in that sense rather than pushing. And they could and the legislature could request that money directly. So, and there are ample opportunities. I mean, there are there are some restrictions on what you can do with that money but that they're wide. And this state has needs, both kind of physical needs in terms of machinery, but but but broader than that. And, you know, the fact that every other state has found ways to use this money tells you I think that it can the restrictions can't be so austere. And there was talk about using some of that money as part of ranked choice voting. And one of the challenges around the ballot initiative when right was being pushed through is that the logistical changes were going to be non-trivial and expensive. It was going to require new machines, we're going to try to require new transport and new norms and things like that. And where is money going to come from and the response was, Well, why don't we use this pot of money. And that's probably what would have happened. But now that we're not going to have ranked choice at least anytime soon. He was interested to hear Jessica, I have heard so much I'm sure many people in the room to have heard so much about those 400 anti voter bills across the nation. And I have to admit I did not know about the 800 expansive voting bills across the nation. And I think many of us can, you know, obviously, both of you have discussed what some of those provisions might include. What is something on there that we might not expect on that list of new proposed legislation. And I think to give you a moment to thank you know when I heard that I was like, Okay, so same day registration. I didn't have an ID, although that wouldn't be a law no order ID, although it might be in some places and expanding access to absentee ballots. Is there anything else in there that we haven't thought of, or that I, you know, like as somebody who's really a lay person in this area hasn't really less obvious ways to expand access to Yeah, so I think one of the things I mean just that I was perfect you know as I was doing research and brushing up on all the things going on across the country. One of the things that I was pleasantly surprised to see where some disability provisions that the state of Virginia was actually putting into effect to help voters, you know, when you when you are disabled and cannot mark your own ballot. You have to think that you can often signify or designate an agent, someone to mark the ballot for you. Some states actually restrict that. But so I thought it was interesting to see some of those provisions in Virginia and I think a couple of other states and that's not something that you know I am affected by but it certainly is something that a large population of our country is. It's a great provision and something that we actually don't talk about a lot. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned it when you mentioned earlier I was I was really struck by how important that can be for some people and yeah I had never thought of it as being the way to expand access to voting. Yeah. Wow. Can I mention one here. Yeah, I would love to hear. I don't actually don't know if it's been refiled this session but last session, there was a, an obligatory vote bill that is a bill to make voting mandatory in Massachusetts. And there are countries around the world where voting is mandatory. It's not unheard of. It does increase turnout as you might expect. It's, it's an interesting approach it has its advantages and disadvantages but it's something that gets filed as a bill periodically. Wow. So, another question from the audience, given the talent of the Senate, how many Senate votes are needed to pass that to those two pieces of legislation. Well we need 60 to get through the cloture vote, which is to allow it to, you know, come to the floor and then another 60 vote to in debate. I think that they'll go through the budget reconciliation process which is a process used, you only have 51 votes for that. Those don't really apply but 60 votes, we have 5051 right now if we come down to but there's going to be a lot of conversation about this bill in the coming weeks and the months. And some tests I think to that filibuster rule that the Senate uses so well or not so well depending on what you want to say. Wow. Looking to see if there are any other questions from the audience. As we're waiting just to see if there are last questions I do want to point out you did a little bit contradict yourself Evan it does seem that although you said that nothing is that anything can be partisan it seems that the right to repair may not be partisan so anything voting related turn. I think you did add that. And just one story I do need to share as we're kind of waiting for the last questions and finishing up tonight. I mentioned I do live in Boston and I was able to vote in Fenway Park and it was super fun and I will always remember the experience of putting up that way it was just, it was such an interesting way to live in 2020. Anyways we're so locked down but on the other hand I also voted in the presidential primary at Fenway Park which is a ton of fun and I think it was something that a lot of Bostonians will always remember. I love hearing that I feel like people don't share enough kind of heartwarming stories about the joys of civic participation. I find voting really satisfying as an experience. I've sat on jury duty, I've sat on juries now three times in my life. It's an amazing thing to participate to, you know, to feel your citizenship at work as it were, and voting allows you to do that. It's can be a wonderful experience. Yeah, yeah. We did have a note from a community member who I believe is also a town meeting member point of information Arlington town meeting approved, ranked choice voting for local elections a couple of weeks ago has to go to legislator as a home role petition which is another you know it's a again the kind of not so much the clash between towns and larger entities but you know we do have to figure out how to work together. Another question about redistricting redistricting could be done by computer software is that in process. Oh, I wish that this participant here had been at our fantastic event on redistricting with the redistricting group from Tufts which was just so interesting what a great panel that one. Yeah, I don't know if either of you can speak to how a few things like if you weren't at that, the redistricting group from Tufts is not a bunch of political scientists, it's a bunch of mathematicians. There's a specialized in topology. It's an amazing group. But yeah, that whole world has shifted in the direction of kind of sophisticated statistical analysis and math, and I the final lines. I mean, so the process in Massachusetts is different than in other states, but the redistricting process as as it's unfolding here will involve a whole bunch of computer simulations that are then that advocates will then look over and push for like there will be computer simulations, and then the fight over the politics and in some ways you can't be hard to get the politics out of it entirely right because the even the whatever the computer spits out has political implications has equity implications and you really want to think those through. So you'll get some samples and then people will start bobbing and okay. I'll also just say that I voted at a baseball stadium in 2020 as well. But to the question, yes, there are a number of different computer systems that have been developed for redistricting purposes, one developed by the group at Tufts and I'm happy to say that I went to a conference with that group a couple of summers ago and just I'm really impressed by all the work that's happening there. But yes, there are a number of different softwares that you can use to draw districts and legislators are using different software. So I would say if you're going to get involved in how doing that process, you know, it'd be a great idea to use the same system that your legislature is using. You can kind of compare maps and potentially they'll share them on the platform as well and you can go in and play with them. But yeah there are there are at least three that I can think of off the top of my head, where people are using computers to draw maps. I think I've ventured. I think the metrics and geometry and gerrymandering group and I just enter their URL into the chat so people can take a look at that it just the work that they do is so interesting it was great to have them come and speak to the community and the community room back in the old days when we used to do that. I want to thank both of you so much for coming out tonight I learned a lot. I was so glad to be able to offer to the community both for the national and local perspective we do think we kind of think about ourselves in Massachusetts is being a little bit separate from so many issues because we are such a we will predominantly so far to the other side but it was fantastic to have both of you speak to these issues. I want to thank you so much and again I want to thank our sponsors for supporting tonight's program the League of Women Voters in Arlington, and the Arlington Libraries Foundation, they too supported the task group presentation so always look out for the great groups that we're having here. Again, you can always find out more about the programs that are offered at the Arlington public libraries in go to our website robinslibrary.org. And in case people did not see it the news is now public so I can share the robins library is scheduled to reopen fully with our most with all of our hours and most of our services on June 21. So lots of work for us to do in the building before that happens but we are so much looking forward to welcoming the community back to our building. Thank you both so much for tonight's presentation and again this presentation has been recorded and you'll if you want to refer your friends and family to it you'll be able to find information on our website. Thank you so much.