Voting Rights

I would like to see us improve access to voting in NJ, and at a national level. Access to voting is the #1 way we're going to not only change things, but *keep* those changes. As we learned the hard way, all the progress in the world doesn't matter if the election is rigged and the next person can just turn things around. In NJ in particular, we made great strides this year with the automatic registration, but voting is still harder than it has to be. I'd like to see a push for more convenient voting-by-mail (VBM) as has been done in other states, with ballot boxes being put in public locations so that people can drop them off if they don't want to mail them (right now you can only drop them off at Clerk's offices during office hours). If we put just one box in each town, that would still greatly increase the options and the ease of VBM, though more than that would be better of course. Also, with the change in law of VBM applications this year, we saw in real time that some clerks just couldn't handle it. It seems that some money spent on educating county clerks offices on election information and specifically, VBM applications and ballots, is needed before the next election. Easier to read VBM applications and ballots wouldn't hurt either. I'd also like to see a push to get the general public to VBM more. I'm not saying we need to go completely VBM like some states, but if we could reach more of the non-voters and let them know they can VBM, it would help. ATNJ did that this year and we reached almost 300,000 non-voting Democrats. If you could work with them to do this next year (and next and next) that would be great. And finally, restoring voting rights to prisoners. Everyone should be able to vote. Period.