Beacon Hill Voted to Uphold Disenfranchisement — Behind Closed Doors

In only two states — Vermont and Maine — individuals with felony convictions never lose their right to vote.

Massachusetts used to be another, until that right was taken away twenty years ago by both state legislators and the public in a racist backlash to political organizing by incarcerated individuals.

Full enfranchisement provides individuals with a link to the outside community that facilitates the goals of rehabilitation and reentry and recognizes that the right to vote is sacred and should not be taken away when the flaws and biases of our criminal legal system are so clear.

Over the past few years, activists have been pushing for Massachusetts to restore voting rights, but the Legislature, given an opportunity to do so last week, instead voted down a proposal — and did so in secret.

S18

Because the House and Senate have yet to agree on a set of Joint Rules (including how and whether to post committee votes), no vote was posted.

By hiding how they voted, the MA legislature continues endorsing and affirming our racist history of disenfranchisement without accountability to the public – a dual loss for democracy. 

So what’s next?

Although the Legislature gave an adverse report to the full goal of voting rights restoration, there is still important work to be done to ensure that those who do still have the right to vote are able to exercise that right.

Citizens who are incarcerated on non-felony convictions or held on pre-trial convictions retain their right to vote. But without a system in place to provide these citizens with access to ballot applications, voting materials, and deadlines, that right is rendered meaningless.

This leads to a de facto disenfranchisement of as many as 10,000 incarcerated citizens.

Sen. Adam Hinds and Reps. Liz Miranda and Chynah Tyler have a bill this session — the Jail-Based Voting Act — to create a long overdue system to provide citizens behind the wall with meaningful access to the ballot.

The bill would require sheriffs to provide all eligible voters ballot applications, voting materials, and a private place to vote; improve registration of returning citizens; create a robust data reporting system for such work; and more.

Can you email your state legislators in support of the Jail-Based Voting Act?

Our 2021 Annual Member Meeting: Videos & Slides

2021 Member Meeting

Thank you to everyone who joined us earlier this month for our 2021 annual member meeting!

We were not able to record every breakout session, but we do have recordings for five of them, which you can watch on our YouTube page: 

You can also view the slides from the three presenters for the “What the COVID Pandemic Reveals about Our State Government” breakout.

And the slides from the “Massachusetts Budget Dilemma: Wealthy State, Inequitable Services” breakout:

A Stunning Degree of Disconnect

Yesterday, when Governor Charlie Baker testified before the Legislature about his administration’s vaccine rollout, there was a stunning degree of disconnect on display.

Baker refused to take any ownership for the failures to date and denied the lack of planning and equity that has been seen and documented across the commonwealth.

As Sen. Jo Comerford said, “This is where we were in two worlds. The committee was in one world. The Baker administration was in another.”

Fortunately, the Legislature can do something about it: they can pass laws.

The Vaccine Equity bill (SD.699 / HD.1283), filed by Senators Becca Rausch and Sonia Chang-Diaz and Representatives Liz Miranda and Mindy Domb, would ensure that equity is prioritized in the vaccine rollout in Massachusetts, recognizing that we can only have a successful recovery if it is an equitable one.

Can you write to your state legislators today about the urgency of passing the Vaccine Equity bill?

Playing by the Best Rules

Sunlight on Beacon Hill

If the Legislature is going to start diving into the work of the new legislative session in earnest, they need to pass a set of Joint Rules. These Joint Rules govern how committees operate and how bills can proceed.

But due to opposition to basic transparency measures from the MA House, there is no agreement yet on these basic operating procedures.

The transparency measures embraced by the Senate are both essential and non-controversial:

  • Publishing committee roll call votes online
  • Making testimony accessible to the public with appropriate redactions (as with any other public record)
  • Extending the notice period for hearings to one week

All of these steps will help legislators do their own jobs better and strengthen the participatory nature of our democracy.

A Conference Committee of three senators and three representatives is currently negotiating what that final set of Joint Rules will look like.

Can you email the Conference Committee today in support of an open and transparent process?

(If the auto-fill email above doesn’t appear, you can use the template here.)

CommonWealth: It’s time to bring transparency to the Legislature

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn just had an editorial printed in CommonWealth about transparency in the MA State House. Read an excerpt below and the full piece here.

***

In 2016, when the Massachusetts Legislature updated the state’s public records laws, they chose to punt on the issue of how such laws should apply to themselves. Indeed, Massachusetts remains the only state where the courts, Legislature, and governor’s office all claim to be fully exempt from public records laws.

In traditional Beacon Hill fashion, the Legislature created a commission to study the issue further, and the bicameral commission ended up with no actual recommendations.

But that’s not the fault of the senators in the commission. Frustrated with their House colleagues, the six Senate members issued their own report on December 31, 2018. In the report, they highlighted several as-of-yet-unadopted ways make the Massachusetts Legislature more accessible, including the release of all written testimony received prior to all committee hearings and any testimony or other materials submitted in-person during the hearing process, upon request and the online publication of any vote recorded either by electronic poll or by a vote of the “yeas and nays” during a committee meeting or executive session.

Earlier this month, the Senate reaffirmed their support for making testimony available (with, of course, appropriate redactions for “sensitive personal information or information that may jeopardize the health, wellness or safety of an individual”) and publishing committee votes online in the Joint Rules. The House again is proving a roadblock. In the Joint Rules on which the House plans to vote today, public access to testimony is gone. And although the House embraced a form of publishing committee votes, they narrowed it to a list of the dissenting votes and the vote count. Why not just list yeas and nays as we do everywhere else?

To be clear, public access to testimony and committee votes are not radical reforms. The majority of US states, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, and New Jersey, publish committee votes online. And states like Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Oregon go further than the proposal to simply make testimony available upon request: they publish it by default—something that the Massachusetts House showed it was able to do last summer with testimony submitted on the police reform bill.

Vote Yes on Question 1, Yes on Question 2

Election Day is just twelve days away. Can you believe it?

On your ballot statewide here in Massachusetts, you’ll see two ballot questions.

YES on Question 1: Right to Repair  🚙🚙

In 2012, Massachusetts voted for a Right to Repair ballot initiative that required automobile manufacturers to provide non-proprietary diagnostic information as well as safety information directly to consumers so that they can choose who repairs their car (rather than being dependent on the manufacturer itself). Technology has advanced in the past eight years, and Question 1 updates the legislative compromise that resulted from the 2012 ballot initiative accordingly. Curbing monopoly power and protecting consumers is a win for all of us.

Yes on 1: Right to Repair Q

YES on Question 2: Ranked Choice Voting 🗳🗳

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. We have some of the least competitive elections in the country, and candidates can win with small pluralities and then stay in office for decades. 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. 

Yes on 2: RCV

📢Find opportunities to volunteer with Yes on 2 here. 📢

📢Join Ayanna Pressley for a phone bank for Yes on 2 next Monday at 5:30 pm. 📢

Climate & Democracy Ballot Questions

Some state representative districts across the commonwealth will see non-binding advisory ballot questions. We are supporting a YES on two of them in particular.

YES on 100% Renewable Energy ☀️☀️

Question: Shall the representative for this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation that would require Massachusetts to achieve 100% renewable energy use within the next two decades, starting immediately and making significant progress within the first five years while protecting impacted workers and businesses?

YES on Transparent Government 🗳🗳

Question: Shall the representative for this district be instructed to vote in favor of changes to the Legislature’s rules that would make the results of all votes in Legislative committees publicly available on the Legislature’s website?

It’s simple: if we want a livable planet, we need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. And our legislators represent us, so we should be able to know how they are voting.

Find out what’s on your ballot here.

CommonWealth: A New Rules Fight

CommonWealth’s Shira Schoenberg wrote about Speaker Robert DeLeo’s short-lived effort to take advantage of the pandemic to make a more top-down House:

Several progressive activists also voiced their concerns about the proposal, even as they generally praised the decision to move to remote voting. Jonathan Cohn, issues chair of Progressive Massachusetts, a group that frequently calls for more transparency at the State House, said requiring the approval of 16 members for a roll call vote is already a higher threshold than what most other states require. “Raising it to 40 is just a way of saying we don’t want these to happen, period,” Cohn said.

CommonWealth: A Secretive Committee Process

PM Issues Committee chairman Jonathan Cohn was quoted in Shira Schoenberg’s new CommonWealth piece on the MA House’s secretive committee process:

Jonathan Cohn, head of the issues committee for the liberal organizing group Progressive Massachusetts, voiced dismay at the lack of transparency and said he has also had mixed experiences – able to get vote totals from some committees, but not from others.

“The problem with the system as it exists is that legislators are able to kill bills giving everyone clean hands afterwards,” Cohn said. “It’s people’s jobs to take votes. They should be willing to defend those votes to their constituents.”

According to Cohn’s research, 26 states make committee votes public on a legislative website.

CommonWealth: A New Year’s Resolution

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn and Act on Mass co-founder Matt Miller penned an editorial for CommonWealth calling on progressive state reps to stand for more roll call votes:

THERE WAS SOMETHING different about the start of this legislative session in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. It wasn’t the composition: Yes, Democrats did manage to flip two seats, but a slightly more overwhelming super-majority isn’t much of a sea change.

It was that Democrats were actually willing to stand up and demand a recorded vote on something.

On January 30, a handful of Democrats committed to demand recorded votes on a series of transparency amendments from Rep. Jon Hecht of Watertown. The content of the amendments would have been noncontroversial to the average voter—giving representatives more time to read bills and amendments, publishing the testimony that interest groups submit on bills, and posting the roll call votes taken behind closed doors in committees online. Simple, right?

Representatives spoke both in favor and against each amendment, and they took a roll call vote. Although the amendments unfortunately went down, the public process is how most people imagine that democracy works: Legislators debate vigorously and then go on record for what they believe in.

But that has become exceedingly rare.