Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Chairman Keenan, Chairman Ryan, and Members of the Joint Committee on Election Laws:
My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group committed to fighting for an equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.
At a time when democracy is under attack in many states, municipalities across Massachusetts are instead seeking to strengthen democracy by expanding both who can participate in our elections and how reflective of the electorate the outcomes are. We ask you to allow them to take the lead by giving a favorable report to several enabling bills:
- H.725: An Act ensuring municipal power over whether elections are reformed
- S.438: An Act ensuring municipal participation of the widest eligible range
- H.706/S.415: An Act extending voting rights in municipal elections to noncitizen voters of the Commonwealth
- H.711/S.433: An Act providing a local option for ranked choice voting in municipal elections
Enabling Municipalities to Expand the Local Electorate: S.438, H.706, S.415
Cities and towns across the Commonwealth have also sought to expand representation in local elections, by extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds or legal non-citizens. The case for both is clear.
With the voting age at 18, many experience their first time voting when they are away at college, often voting by absentee back home if at all. 16 and 17-year-olds, by contrast, know their local polling locations well: they are the elementary schools, the middle schools, the high schools, the town halls, the libraries. They feel the impact of a school committee election directly. And they can get a powerful experience of democracy in action, which is the best civic education.
Similarly, voting and civic engagement are ways of integrating new community members and strengthening the whole community. Non-citizen parent involvement in school affairs (through school committee elections) can increase students’ academic performance, and democracy works best when all communities are reflected in governance.
Moreover, both teen voting and all-resident voting embody the basic principle of no taxation with representation.
Ranked Choice Voting Local Option: H.711/S.433
When voters get to the ballot box, they can face complicated choices. Our first-past-the-post system forces ordinary voters to weigh whether they can vote for their preferred candidate or whether doing so would lead to a “spoiler effect” that gives a candidate they like less a clearer path to victory. This same dynamic can lead candidates and their supporters to try to force similar candidates out of a race due to a fear of “vote splitting.”
Within the current system, the ultimate winner may command less than a majority support, a contradiction of a basic tenet of democracy and a far too common occurrence in Massachusetts elections. Ranked Choice Voting would eliminate these problems by enabling voters to rank the order of their preferences on the ballot and ensuring that whoever wins does so with majority support.
Although the ballot initiative to implement Ranked Choice Voting for state and county elections did not pass, the measure did pass in 78 municipalities in varying parts of the Commonwealth. If such municipalities wish to adopt Ranked Choice Voting for local elections, they should not have to face undue hurdles to doing so.
The number of cities and towns passing home rule petitions on these three issues grows every year, and yet such petitions continue to die in the Legislature. We urge you to stop being a roadblock to democracy and pass these enabling bills.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Cohn
Policy Director
Progressive Massachusetts