Report Alleges that 1 in 10 Who Tried to Vote Last November Couldn't Cast Ballots
By Michael P. Norton for the State House News Service
      A voting rights and election reform group on Wednesday said nearly one in 10 eligible voters were not allowed to cast ballots last November 2 in Massachusetts, a claim that was sharply disputed by the state’s top election official.
      Unveiling conclusions based on poll monitoring in 11 Massachusetts cities with large minority populations, Nadine Cohen, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association, said volunteers found problems with absentee ballots, provisional voting, poll workers, and broken voting equipment.
      Voters who said they had registered at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, Rock the Vote events and other registration drives found their names were not on voting lists, Cohen said. “People who have duly registered to vote don’t appear on the voting list,” said Cohen. “That is what we found in our observation.”
      Other potential voters could not obtain language assistance, were told they could not bring a helper with them into the polling booth, and were given incorrect information by rude and unprofessional poll workers, she said. The Election Protection Project featured more than 624 volunteers who were dispatched to 232 city polling places to observe voting procedures and survey voters. The volunteers documented cases in which more than 3,000 of the 41,000 voters observed were not allowed to cast a regular ballot. Extrapolating based on those findings, project organizers estimate that between 100,000 and 200,000 of the 3 million people who were eligible to vote were disenfranchised.
      “Voter disenfranchisement doesn’t only happen in Ohio or Florida,” said Juan Martinez, executive director of project organizer MassVOTE, a coalition of non-profit organizations committed to election reform. “These issues occur in every election in states across the country, including Massachusetts, and they need to be addressed.”
       The poll monitoring was conducted in Boston, Brockton, Chelsea, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, Somerville, Springfield and Worcester. Martinez said MassVOTE has roots in seven of those cities.