News Clips

“The Massachusetts Legislature just adopted a critical election reform package that will help ensure that no citizen has to choose between their health and their right to vote,” said Pam Wilmot, Executive Director of Common Cause which has fought hard for the bill. “The bill embodies best practices from across the country and will help our election system cope with the unprecedented threat of COVID-19.”

Pam Wilmot of Common Cause Massachusetts, which advocates for expanded voting access, said of the new regulations, “There’s a lot of steps both for voters and for clerks.”

Common Cause Massachusetts Executive Director Pam Wilmot said that while she believes mailing ballots to all would be the "most efficient system," she recognizes the barriers to setting it up in time this year. "We've heretofore done very little voting by mail, and the sort of transition to a full mail system is something that typically takes many, many years," she said. "We certainly are pushing for this reform in many places, but politics is the art of the possible."

"With those changes, this bill will ensure that Bay Staters -- who may otherwise have been prevented from casting a ballot by the coronavirus pandemic -- can exercise their fundamental right to participate in our democracy," said Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts.

Prior to Tuesday’s session, Common Cause Massachusetts and more than 80 organizations, including ACLU and MassPIRG, threw their support behind three amendments filed by Sens. Jo Comerford, Adam Hinds, and Eric Lesser dealing with an online portal to request ballots, postmarking ballots to ensure they are properly counted, and extending the deadline to request mail-in or absentee ballots to the Friday before Election Day. All three were adopted during Tuesday’s session.

"A number of states, including Massachusetts, are looking at using mail-in voting for the 2020 election. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin has said he wants to start printing ballots for fall elections as soon as June 2. That means a decision on mail-in voting needs to be made quickly."