One year ago today, in the midst of the pandemic, Massachusetts embarked on a bold experiment to drastically expand and improve voters’ options for casting their ballot.

In last fall’s elections, for the first time in our history, voters could cast mail-in ballots without needing an excuse, and every eligible voter received a mail-in ballot application in advance of Election Day.  The election reform law extended the deadline for voter registration, added new periods of early voting, and supported communities that wanted to add ballot dropboxes and other options to make it easier for voters to safely cast ballots.

Despite some initial skepticism and a bumpy rollout, last year’s reforms were, by and large, successful.  Massachusetts experienced record-breaking voter turnout in last year’s primary and general elections—an impressive achievement that was enabled by our new voting laws and the hard work of local election administrators who made the weeks around Election Day run smoothly.  Hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts voters exercised their democratic right to participate, and they did so safely in the midst of the pandemic.

The only problem?  All of last year’s reforms have now expired, after being extended from the end of last year to June 30 of this year, and then allowed to lapse.  As of July 1, 2021, Massachusetts has reverted to the old rules for running elections—as though all the progress we made last year never occurred.

As a voting rights advocate, I find this state of affairs disappointing.

But rather than grow frustrated by the (hopefully temporary) lapse of last year’s reforms, we should view it as an opportunity for Massachusetts to seize the moment and become a national leader on voting rights.

That leadership is critically needed.  Right now, states like Georgia, Texas, and Florida are making it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot and backsliding on basic commitments to free and fair elections.  At the national level, just last week the Supreme Court issued a ruling that weakened protections in the Voting Rights Act that were designed to combat state laws that target and suppress minority voters—exactly the kinds of laws that are now cropping up all over the nation.  All told, these developments amount to a serious threat to our ability to hold free and fair elections, and the future vitality of our American democracy.

We in Massachusetts can push back against these dangerous trends by becoming a model for how to conduct safe, fair, accessible elections.

Making last year’s voting reforms permanent would be a good start.  It’s encouraging that there appears to be a consensus among leaders at the State House to do just that.

But we should go further.  Seizing the moment and demonstrating to the rest of the country what a modern multiracial democracy looks like requires our state leaders to push the envelope and embrace reforms that have been proven to work in other states.

The most critical of these is same-day registration.  In twenty-one other states (and Washington, D.C.) voters can register to vote right up to and including Election Day.  In Massachusetts, we’ve now reverted back to the old way of doing things, which cuts off registration a full twenty days before an election takes place—just when many eligible voters are starting to get interested in a race and learn about candidates.  It is long past time Massachusetts caught up to the rest of the country and gave local clerks the resources they need to register eligible voters right up to, and including, Election Day.

There are plenty of other dated aspects of our election laws that should be modernized.  For one, automatic voter registration, which was enacted in 2018, has never been fully implemented, meaning that many individuals who ought to have been added to our voting rolls have not been.  And there are many voters in state correctional facilities, or who have recently finished serving a sentence for a crime, who have the right to vote but have been prevented from exercising it due to bureaucratic inattention and the state’s failure to inform citizens what their rights are.

Fortunately, there is pending legislation that addresses these concerns.  Lawmakers should pass the VOTES Act, which has the support of voting rights advocates and has been cosponsored by a majority of state legislators in both chambers.

More broadly, our state leaders should fill the vacuum left by the expired 2020 reforms by redoubling our commitment to voting rights in the Commonwealth.  As states across the country roll back voting access and suppress minority voters, Massachusetts should seize the opportunity to serve as a model for how to achieve a truly representative democracy.

The times demand nothing less.

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Patrick Roath is a Boston-based attorney and voting rights advocate.  Until recently, he served as chair of the governing board of Common Cause Massachusetts, and has litigated multiple Massachusetts voting rights cases.