“Make National Voter Registration Day worth celebrating” — Jonathan Cohn, CommonWealth (9/26/2017)
TODAY IS National Voter Registration Day. It also happens to be the day of Boston’s preliminary election.
But there’s one way that Boston residents won’t be able to celebrate today’s holiday: registering at the polls.
That’s because Massachusetts remains an outlier in New England in not embracing same day registration. Maine has allowed people to register at the polls since the 1970s; New Hampshire, since the 1990s; Vermont and Connecticut joined in more recently. Even Rhode Island has a form of same day registration—albeit just for presidential elections. If our fellow New England states can manage same day registration, so can we.