Editorial: Voting is our ‘human right’

Sometimes it takes a special person to remind us of how special our right to vote is. One such person is Mary Fernsebner of Greenfield, who is both a United Arc member and who sits on its board.

“It’s my human right,” she said, accepting the agency’s challenge to share her passion for voting, along with the importance of being educated at the polls, with her friends.

Fernsebner’s commitment inspired The United Arc in Turners Falls, an agency that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to hold a voter registration drive in July for the whole community as part of National Disability Voter Registration Week. Executive director Lynne Bielecki explained, “To exercise your right to vote is a part of being in the community.”

United Arc realizes they have a lot at stake in the upcoming election, with the departures of Stan Rosenberg and Stephen Kulik, and the death of Peter Kocot — all staunch advocates of the United Arc’s mission. “We certainly want to encourage those who fill those three vacant seats that they understand what those issues are and make sure we have the same support of those issues as we have had,” Bielecki said.

Brian Ross, director of adult services, says United Arc tries to make sure they educate members about the power of local elections and having their voice heard there.

What is going on at United Arc is a microcosm of what should be going on in every nook and corner of the county: Person-to-person advocacy, voter registration drives and voter education.

In Massachusetts, the right to vote is available to every adult citizen who is not currently incarcerated as a felon. This was not always so, points out Denise Petrin of Gill. Petrin, a member of the League of Women Voters of Franklin County, said, “Generations of Americans struggled to gain the right to suffrage. Yet, this very bedrock of our democracy — the right to vote — is not utilized by many of its eligible citizens. The United States is near the bottom of developed nations in voter turnout.”

Getting people signed up to vote is a politically fraught battleground nationally, with Republicans fearing that new voters coming from the ranks of the young, the poor and minorities are more likely to vote for Democrats. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to outlaw discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.

And yet, even today, efforts to restrict access to voting persist.

Following the 2016 election, President Donald Trump falsely claimed millions voted illegally, perpetuating the myth of fraud used to justify restrictive legislation such as strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks, and registration restrictions. Since then, at least five states have advanced bills restricting voting access through at least one chamber. In neighboring New Hampshire, the legislature has passed a bill targeting student voting.

In Massachusetts, efforts to increase voting include Election Day registration and automatic registration. The results so far have been mixed. The Supreme Judicial Court ruled against Election Day registration, saying that the 20-day deadline “does not disenfranchise any voter.” Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, called the decision “a blow, not just to Massachusetts voters, but to the democratic process,” and urged the state Legislature to both change the registration law and pass a bill to ensure automatic registration when eligible voters deal with state agencies.

Progress has been made on this last effort, when lawmakers on July 30 gave final approval to a bill that would automatically update the registration status of voters when they interact with the Registry of Motor Vehicles and MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program. If the bill is signed into law by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, Democratic Secretary of State William Galvin said his office would be able to start automatically registering voters on Jan. 1, 2020.

We urge Gov. Baker to sign this bill into law.

And we urge readers to follow the lead of Mary Fernsebner who, when asked if she would go back to her friends and share her excitement, along with the importance of being educated about the issues, replied, “Yes, because I love to vote.”