Black voter turnout report

Closing the Turnout Gap

Lessons from an Intervention to Increase Black Voter Turnout in Boston’s 2021 Mayoral Election

LEAD AUTHOR Steph Domond, Fellow at Priorities for Progress

In 2021, Policy For Progress (PFP) performed a series of polls investigating reasons for relatively low turnout among Black voters in the preliminary stage of the city’s 2021 mayoral election. Using the opportunity of Boston’s two-stage mayoral elections, PFP then conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) to test the impact of receiving a mailer and personalized text message on likelihood to vote in the final stage of the same mayoral election among a randomized population of 35,500 Black voters in Boston who had voted in the 2020 Presidential election but not the 2019 municipal preliminary election.

PFP found that a mailer and personalized text message had a statistically significant, positive effect on final-election turnout among voters who had not voted in the preliminary election.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steph Domond is a Research Fellow at Priorities For Progress, where his work focuses on voter engagement. Prior to his work with PFP, he conducted policy and political analysis for a wide range of organizations in California and Massachusetts, including internships with the Gavin Newsom for Governor, John Chiang for Governor, and Elizabeth Warren for President campaigns.

ABOUT PRIORITIES FOR PROGRESS

Priorities For Progress (PFP) analyzes and engages the Massachusetts electorate to prioritize pragmatic, results-oriented policies. PFP conducts polling to determine the Commonwealth’s political reality, informs the public about evidence-based policies, and supports leaders to create lasting change. PFP has been active in Massachusetts politics since 2018.

LEAN MORE

PrioritiesForProgress.org Twitter @PrioritiesMass

CONTACT

Please contact Policy Advisor John Griffin: john@prioritiesforprogress.org

We welcome feedback on this report as well as ideas for future research and advocacy.

Orange text denotes hyperlinks

Introduction

Massachusetts likes to think of itself as a vanguard of democracy and beacon of equity. The Commonwealth did, after all, pass the world’s oldest constitution still in use today. Yet when it comes to Black voter engagement, Massachusetts is anything but a national model. On the contrary, the Bay State has the lowest Black voter registration and turnout among all fifty states. Only 36% of Massachusetts’ Black voters participated in the 2020 presidential election, versus 73% in Mississippi.

Off-cycle and lower-profile elections

The pattern is even more pronounced in lower-profile elections. In Boston’s 2021 preliminary mayoral election, only 23% of the city’s Black voters went to the polls; the vast majority of Black Bostonians who voted in the 2020 general election did not go to the polls in September 2021. These are voters who come out for national elections–but have not yet been convinced to do so at similar rates for local races.

At the national level, the lion’s share of investment in registering and turning out voters is focused on the highest-participation elections that are the most partisan and polarized, like presidential-year general elections. In many states, these elections are where voters have the most opportunity to exercise their voice–and where racial turnout disparities have the greatest likelihood of harming communities of color. The focus thus becomes reaching those voters who otherwise would not vote in these high-profile elections, which often includes working to oppose or dismantle active efforts at voter suppression.

Some aspects of this approach apply to Massachusetts better than others. Addressing the Commonwealth’s worst-in-the-nation Black voter registration numbers, for example, requires reaching current non-voters. At the same time, though, the Commonwealth has few of the highly partisan, polarized elections where this strategy is most likely to yield positive results.

Solving Massachusetts’s unique turnout problems

In Massachusetts, by contrast, many crucial elections are less partisan and polarized because the Democratic Party’s dominance makes primaries and municipal elections more consequential, from a voter choice point of view, than higher-turnout general elections. While all voter groups are less likely to vote in these kinds of elections, the drop-off is especially large among Black voters. This paper thus investigates how to increase turnout in these low-profile, high-importance elections among Black voters who have been activated to participate in higher-profile elections already.

Massachusetts has the lowest Black voter registration and turnout among all fifty states.

THE UNIQUE POLITICS OF MASSACHUSETTS

IN SWING STATES

National level elections are crucial from a voter choice perspective.

IN MASSACHUSETTS

Off-cycle, primary, and municipal elections are more crucial from a voter choice perspective.

Research Questions & Methods

As a first step to investigating causes of the Black voter drop-off and solutions to the problem, PFP asked two related research questions and used a different method to approach each question.

Research questions Research Methods

Why is local-election turnout so low among those Black voters in Boston who do vote in national-level elections (like the 2020 presidential election). Put another way, what causes the drop-off?

Can these voters be activated to vote in lower-profile elections, and if so, how?

To investigate the causes we directly polled drop-off voters

Starting from the universe of Black Bostonians who voted in the 2020 presidential election but not the 2021 preliminary mayoral election, we asked a sample of these voters to describe their reasons for not voting in the latter.

To investigate potential solutions we used a randomized conrol trial (RCT)

Our RCT tested whether personalized texts and a mailer could improve the likelihood that voters in this drop-off universe would vote in the final round of Boston’s mayoral election.

Summary of Implications

Our findings from these two research methods suggest that Black voter turnout can be improved through greater outreach to drop-off voters.

POLL OF PRELIMINARY ELECTION DROP-OFF VOTERS

In PFP’s poll of preliminary election drop-off voters, most said they did not vote in the September 2021 election because they were busy (32%) or lacked sufficient information (26%). Each of these causes could be addressed by reminding voters of the election, encouraging them to vote, and providing them with early information about voting methods available to them in case they are unable to vote in person on Election Day.

PFP’S RCT

PFP’s RCT suggests that the Black voter drop-off can be reduced by individual appeals to likely drop-off voters. In our RCT, such appeals (by text message and mailer) had a statistically significant effect of increasing voter turnout; voters who received such appeals had a 20.2% turnout rate in the final election, versus 18.9% among similar voters who did not receive the appeals. While this effect constitutes a small increase, it suggests that similar strategies do have an impact and could be combined for greater impact. Furthermore, our RCT suggests that these efforts would be relatively inexpensive to replicate, with our campaign generating roughly 14 additional voters per $1,000 dollars spent. Given that the mayoral election’s total expenditures approached $10 million, a larger investment in the kind of strategy tested by our RCT could yield even greater improvements to turnout.

Turnout rate in the final election

20.2%

voters who received our appeals

18.9% similar voters who did not receive the appeals.

Placing Boston’s Low Black Voter Turnout into Context

According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Massachusetts has the lowest Black voter turnout and registration of any state in the country. In the state’s 2022 primary elections–in which most races were effectively decided in advance due to a near-nonexistent GOP–several majority-white, wealthy suburbs counted more votes than racially diverse cities twice or three times their size: the majority-white suburb of Brookline, for instance, cast more votes than the much larger and more diverse city of Springfield. Yet while much national attention flows to battles over voter rights and turnout efforts in states like Georgia and Alabama, Massachusetts’ record of disparities in voter turnout and engagement flies under the radar.

Part of that blind spot could be old-fashioned Massachusetts exceptionalism. But it also has to do with the different nature of the problem in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth’s disparities in voter turnout have different causes than in states where high-profile fights over voter rights and suppression have activated advocates. These different causes require different solutions. In choosing a location to investigate and test these solutions, we chose Boston first because it is Massachusetts’ biggest city, has a large Black population, and features more electoral spending than other parts of the Commonwealth.

In investigating why Boston has such low turnout among Black voters in municipal elections specifically, this report aims to give policymakers and advocates better information to address the problem.

National Context for Low Turnout among Black Voters

Much of the current advocacy around voter rights and engagement focuses explicitly on efforts to remove explicit suppression and barriers to voting. This is especially true in some Southern states, where some state and local governments continue to pass laws that disproportionately dampen turnout among Black voters.

The Brennan Center has documented many such instances of modern-day voter suppression:

■ Restrictions on Sunday voting

■ Elimination of polling places in majority-Black precincts

■ Imposition of voter ID requirements.

■ Black voters having longer wait times than white voters

■ Closing polling sites in Black communites

At the federal level, the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and appears poised to weaken the VRA’s ban on racial gerrymandering in Merrill v. Milligan, for which the Court is hearing arguments as of October 2022.

Historically Black voters have waited longer than White voters in line to vote, faced numerous voter suppression laws or tactics, and gerrymandered districts. While a 2020 study by Pew research found that Black voters nationwide grew slightly in the past 18 years (2% in Massachusetts), those gains may be lost if Black voters feel disenfranchised or discounted in elections.

The Commonwealth’s disparities in voter turnout have different causes than in states where high-profile fights over voter rights and suppression have activated advocates.

The causes of voter racial turnout disparities can arise from varied and arguable levels of intentionality. One study looking at the consequences of political inequality and voter suppression explains how many policies appear innocuous on their face, but result in deepened disparities due to their implementation in the context of general systemic racism.

Policies can make voting easier or harder

Take voter registration: in the past, states went to great lengths to suppress Black voters by creating barriers to register such as literacy tests, poll taxes, or language requirements.

Massachusetts has enacted policy to remove barriers and make registration easier with online and automatic voter registration, but the Commonwealth still has an inactive voters list that can lead to voters being unregistered. Voters become inactive if they do not respond to the annual street list every city and town sends out as a census. Inactive voters are allowed to vote, but they must show proper identification and affirm their current and continuous address. Inactive voters can lose their registration status if they fail to vote in two consecutive biennial state elections. Studies show that people of color, low-income people and the young are more likely to move even if it is within a state. The intention of Massachusetts’ inactive voter lists may be to maintain an accurate record of voters, but it inadvertently creates an administrative hurdle that disproportionately impacts people of color, low-income people, and young people. Similarly, Washington State was an early adopter of vote-by-mail, but a 2020 election audit found that the state’s Black residents had their mail-in vote thrown out four times as often as white voters.

National efforts to decrease turnout disparities often take on overtly partisan tones, but research largely suggests that increased voter turnout yields no partisan advantage to either party on the whole. Shaw and Petricik, for example, find that turnout rates do not predict election results, finding that changes in turnout have had “little to no systematic partisan effect” over the past 70 years. Elections instead are decided by the underlying partisanship, or short-term forces like current economic conditions. Even when comparing presidential elections (when turnout can be twenty percent higher, with other elections, Shaw and Petrocik could not find an impact of turnout on the outcome of elections.

Nonetheless, the United States’ history of Black voter suppression is reflected in a continued lower nationwide turnout rate for Black Americans as compared to white Americans. This pattern perpetuates political inequality by weakening the voice of Black Americans in elections, and evidence strongly suggests that closing voter turnout disparities along lines of race and class would yield substantially different political outcomes.

Evidence strongly suggests that closing voter turnout disparities along lines of race and class would yield substantially different political outcomes.

STUDY OF VOTERS VS. NON-VOTERS

A 2015 study by Demos found that nonvoters hold stronger support than voters for policies that increase services, improve living standards, reduce inequality, and guarantee jobs.

The Demos study also highlights a key fact about voter turnout in the United States: voter turnout disparities along lines of race and class grow wider in midterm elections

Dropoff rate between the 2012 Presidential election and the 2014 midterms

Non-Hispanic white 29% Black Americans 40%

Outsized Impact of the Drop-off in Massachusetts

That drop-off is especially noteworthy for Black voters in Massachusetts. As noted in PFP’s prior election reform policy brief: Our Democracy is Having an Off Day, holding Massachusetts’ local and municipal elections off-cycle (on odd years when federal elections are held on even years) contributes to lower voter turnout. The dropoff rate between the last on-cycle (2020) and off-cycle election (2021) was 65%. Only 16.5% of Boston voters voted in the 2019 municipal elections, and while turnout improved in last year’s 2021 preliminary municipal election, it was still low at 28.9%, with only 23% of Boston’s Black voters going to the polls.

35,999 (65%) of Boston’s Black voters who voted in the 2020 general election did not vote in the 2021 preliminary municipal election, 82.6% of which were between 18-35. In 2020, young Black voters had the highest turnout among any age group of Black voters, with 29.3% of the total 54,970 Black votes cast in Boston. In 2020–the dropoff among this cohort thus represents an especially large, missed opportunity to engage voters in local elections.

While not quite as pronounced, the drop-off rate from the 2020 general to the 2021 preliminary municipal elections still remained high among older voters. 69.4% of 35-49 year old Black voters 57.6% of Black voters between 50-64 years old, and 46.4% of Black voters aged 65+ years or older voted in the 2020 general election but not the 2021 preliminary municipal election. 97% of these drop-off voters were Democrats or independents, with only 2% of drop-off voters registered Republicans.

The effects of the drop-off in Boston politics

This drop-off is concerning because municipal elections have major implications on the everyday lives of voters. Boston, for instance, has not yet elected a Black mayor, and Black leadership is scarcely found in upper levels of Massachusetts’ government. In a strong-mayor system like Boston’s, services like education, housing, transit, and law enforcement, and any necessary reforms, are controlled, chosen and implemented by the winners of local elections. Low turnout among voters of color thus contributes to unrepresentative municipal governments and, potentially, less equitable policy outcomes. This dynamic is consistent with continued racial disparities across outcomes in Massachusetts. Whether in economic terms or in terms of equality and opportunity, Massachusetts Black communities have been systemically disenfranchised. Decreasing the drop-off effect among Black voters represents one strategy to achieve greater progress in these domains.

The authors of Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics research found that “in most communities, municipal governments do not represent African American and Latino citizens’ interests.” By measuring the “distance” between the average ideology of the council and the average ideology of each racial group, they found “Whites’ ideologies were closest to those of the municipal councilors, whether they were a small or large proportion of the population.” When enacting policies local governments would also enact the preferred choice of White voters. Studies point to Black candidates increasing turnout amongst all disengaged voters because they are more likely to do outreach to those voters, and more Black candidates running and being elected to office helps create a positive feedback loop raising Black voter turnout.

The drop-off persists

This drop-off persists despite a number of policies Massachusetts has enacted to increase turnout and close turnout disparities:

■ In January 2020, Massachusetts adopted automatic voter registration. Any Massachusetts citizen who commits a transaction through the Registry of Motor Vehicles, Masshealth, or the Commonwealth Health Connector, if eligible, will be registered to vote unless they opt out.

■ Pre-Registration allows eligible voters to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday. Massachusetts allows those who are 16 or 17 years old to submit a voter registration form to their local election official, who then places their name on the list of pre-registrants.

■ The expansion of vote-by-mail likely contributed to increased voter turnout in the 2020 and 2022 elections. Yet in 2020, voters in whiter and wealthier towns appear to have been more likely to take advantage of the option.

Low turnout among voters of color thus contributes to unrepresentative municipal governments and, potentially, less equitable policy outcomes.

Boston voters who voted in 2021 28.9%

Black Boston voters who voted in 2021 23%

The good news

Research suggests that “drop-off” voters can be engaged to vote more consistently in local elections. One study, “Turnout as a Habit,” found that voting is habit forming. While certain people only voted when they cared about elections, people who consistently voted a few times continue to vote. Low turnout, along with systemic disenfranchisement, contribute to a negative feedback loop for disenfranchised communities that disproportionately rely on city services (e.g. even though Black voters make up 14% of the electorate in Boston, 33% of Boston Public School children are Black).

For Boston, then, one question is key to closing voter turnout gaps: what will bring “drop-off” voters to the polls for primaries and municipal elections?

PFP and the 2021 Boston Mayoral Election

In seeking an answer to this question, PFP aims to fill a relatively large gap in the research literature on voter turnout. To date, relatively few studies have investigated how to increase Black voter turnout in lowerprofile elections, like municipal contests or primaries. PFP’s randomized control trial (RCT) of a reminder-to-vote campaign was modeled after one of the only other such efforts, work to boost Black voter turnout for the 2020 Democratic primary in North Carolina.

PFP decided to launch this study after noting the severity and impact of the drop-off effect among Black voters in Boston’s 2021 preliminary municipal election. Three Black candidates ran in the 2021 mayoral race, but none got past the preliminary municipal election. For Black Bostonians disproportionately affected by city policies, understanding how to effectively counter the drop-off of Black voters in local elections is imperative.

PFP used the two-stage nature of Boston’s municipal elections to contribute to greater understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. As described in the methods section below, PFP polled drop-off voters from the preliminary stage of the election, then tested a voter engagement campaign to determine the potential effect of such a campaign on turnout. With this report, PFP hopes to add to the limited body of existing research on Black turnout in non-presidential elections. Our hypothesis is that filling this gap will help policymakers to design better solutions to close voter turnout disparities.

Turnout by precinct during Tuesday’s preliminary election in Boston.

Courtesy MassINC Polling Group

METHOD 1

Poll of Boston’s Black “Drop-off Voters”

Poll Design

In designing our poll of Boston’s Black drop-off voters, we sought to shed light on why voters active in national elections would not vote in local races. Lower turnout in local races is well-documented, but the reasons for this drop-off are not as commonly investigated. We set out to fill this gap on the assumption that successful strategies to increase voter turnout among this group would need to start from a better understanding of why the drop-off occurs.

To that end, we polled respondents within the universe of 35,999 Black Bostonians who voted in the 2020 presidential election but not the 2021 preliminary municipal election–i.e., drop-off voters. In a phone/ online survey conducted from October 19 to October 22, 2022 with Carr Marketing, we asked these voters to describe why they had not voted in the 2021 preliminary election.

Results

When polled, a plurality of drop-off voters (32%) said they were too busy to vote. The other most-cited reason was a lack of sufficient information (26%). Notably, each of these causes can be addressed by voter engagement: a busy voter might be convinced to take time out of her day or informed about alternative voting methods, while a voter who lacks information could be convinced to vote with slightly more engagement. The large number of voters who cited being busy as a reason not to vote also suggests that streamlining the elections schedule and moving all elections on-cycle could increase turnout. It is also worth investigating whether voters who cite being “too busy” to vote are responding to a belief that their votes do not matter, and thus that changing this belief could in itself increase turnout among this group, regardless of changes to the election structure itself.

METHOD 2

RCT to Test Effect of Personal Appeals on Turnout

As described above, polling demonstrated that the reasons driving drop-off voter behavior were at least plausibly subject to intervention–that improved engagement or encouragement of these voters could lead to higher levels of turnout in local elections. The next step was thus to test whether such an intervention could actually yield higher turnout.

Boston’s two-stage municipal elections structure provided a unique opportunity to study this question. In Boston, municipal elections are non-partisan; in mayoral elections, for example, all candidates compete in a September preliminary election, and the top two vote-getters from that round advance to November’s final election. The preliminary election provided a ready-made universe of drop-off voters: all Black voters in Boston who had voted in the 2020 presidential election but not in the 2021 preliminary.

A randomized control trial (RCTs) is a research design whereby a population is randomly divided into two groups–one that will receive a given intervention, and one that will not–so that researchers can measure the impact of that intervention with as little likelihood as possible that some other, unknown influence is causing the difference in the measured result. With the large size of our universe of voters, an RCT allowed us to measure whether a personalized text message and mailer would cause higher turnout among Black drop-off voters in Boston.

RCT Design

PFP implemented an RCT with a data analytics firm to test the ability of a get-outthe-vote mailer and a text messaging program to increase Black voter turnout for Boston’s final municipal election in November 2021, within the same universe of drop-off voters who voted in 2020, but not the 2021 preliminary municipal election. These approximately 35,500 voters were randomized at the household level and split into two equal groups: one that would receive personalized outreach, and one that would not. This randomized split allowed us to measure the isolated impact of the outreach itself.

■ Get-out-the vote call

■ An issue-based GOTV mailer with social pressure. The mailer was addressed specifically to each voter who received it.

■ A single text message sent to voters the day before the election. The text message thanked voters for voting in the 2020 presidential election; reminded them that they had not voted in the preliminary election; and gave them information about the upcoming, final election.

METHODS AND RESULTS

Results

The results of this study are promising: our RCT showed that a program of personalized outreach can have a positive, statistically significant impact on turnout among Black drop-off voters. Specifically, voters in the group that received our outreach had a turnout level of 20.2% in the final election, versus 18.9% among those who did not receive the outreach. Statistically, the actual impact could fall anywhere from 0.5 to 2.2 percentage points, within a 95% confidence interval.

A turnout level of 20.2% is still low and a problem to solve. It is important to note that PFP’s efforts specifically targeted relatively low turnout voters. Given that no voters in our universe had voted in the preliminary local election, it stands to reason that their turnout level in the final local election would be lower than average. This was indeed the case, with city turnout at 32.7%.

In terms of demographic differences in the size of our outreach’s effect, the campaign had a slightly stronger impact on registered Democrats and voters with high partisan scores, meaning they had a greater likelihood to vote for Democrats.

Effect of PFP’s outreach

The 95% interval shows that the outreach increased turnout by 1.4 percentage points, with the 95% confidence interval falling between 0.5 and 2.2 percentage points.

Effect of PFP’s outreach by political party

The 95% interval shows that the outreach shows that the effect was stronger on those with partisan affiliations than on those who claimed no partisan affiliation.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Our research, polling, and RCT around Black voter turnout in Boston’s 2021 municipal election have a clear takeaway: the drop-off in Black voter turnout between national and local elections is an understated problem in Boston, and must be addressed. Our poll of Black drop-off voters suggested that many could be convinced to vote through engagement and better information; our RCT strengthened that hypothesis by showing that a relatively light and inexpensive social pressure campaign could yield a statistically significant, positive effect on turnout among drop-off voters.

Importantly, our RCT suggests that campaigns like this can be cost-effective. Our campaign generated 14 additional votes per $1,000 spent. In comparison, the upper range of traditional GOTV mail efforts suggest approximately 10 votes per $1,000, while our estimates for non-social pressure texting efforts range from 7-10 votes per $1,000.

The size of our study’s effect was 1.4 percentage points. That may seem small, but the broader implication of our study is that engaging drop-off voters can decrease the drop-off. Governments, campaigns, and nonprofits could build off of this study by putting more energy and resources into reaching those voters who sometimes vote, but not in local elections. Many campaigns with effect sizes between 1 and 2 percentage points could combine into a groundswell of improved turnout among Black drop-off voters.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY AND ADVOCACY

Our recommendation for policymakers and advocates is to focus resources on increasing turnout among drop-off voters. In Boston, we recommend a special focus on Black drop-off voters.

Recommendations include

■ The state and local governments should acknowledge the importance of civic participation by actively reminding drop-off voters that they did not vote in recent local elections and giving them information about upcoming elections.

■ More advocates should focus on reaching drop-off voters and getting them to the polls.

■ The election schedule should be streamlined around “oncycle” elections to decrease the amount of time required for voters to participate in multiple elections, thereby decreasing the likelihood that a voter will choose not to vote because she is too busy and cannot find the time.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

In order to better understand how to increase turnout in less-advertised, more impactful local and municipal elections, there is a clear need for more research to better understand the likely return for this kind of campaign investment, and what outreach options would be most cost and turnout effective. We hope that this work can add to both Massachusetts and the nation’s understanding of how to best increase voter turnout for all.

Our RCT last year is one of the few studies on increasing African American turnout, but in 2018 the Center for American Progress (CAP) produced a study outlining numerous policy proposals to increase participation and make voting more convenient.

Finally, our RCT points to another policy choice: prioritizing Black voter outreach. While some proposals for boosting Black voter turnout focus on recruiting more Black candidates, the connection between Black candidates and Black turnout needs further investigation. Some studies show that Black voters in states with a greater number of Black state legislators are more likely to be voters because the candidates are more likely to contact them.

Current Proposals to Close Voter Turnout Gaps

Below are several proposals currently on the table, both in Massachusetts and nationwide, to close turnout disparities along lines of race and class. Many of these strategies are outlined in a Center for American Progress report, “Increasing Voter Participation in America.”

Online registration

A proposed strategy to get more people to the ballots. While Massachusetts doesn’t limit automatic voter registration (AVR) to just DMV applicants, some people might fall through the cracks. Online registration allows people to register when it is most convenient for them. Massachusetts voters can register online 20 days before the election provided they have a signature on file from the RMV.

Same Day Registration (SDR)

SDR would allow voters to register on Election Day at the ballot box. Despite limited research on increasing minority turnout, a recent study from Demos and the University of Massachusetts showed that SDR, with the exception of one year, saw an average sincrease of Black turnout of 2-17 percentage points compared to non-SDR states.

No Excuse Absentee Voting

This allows voters to vote by mail or early (in person) regardless of their reason. In 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19, no excuse absentee ballots allow a voter to vote by mail or in person before the election. This policy, however, was not made permanent. Generally, to apply for an absentee ballot voters need to be either away from their city/town on election day, have a disability that keeps them from voting at their polling place, or have a religious belief that prevents them from voting at their polling place on Election Day. Ballots must be requested in writing at least 4 business days before Election Day. The ballots must then be returned by mail or in person to a city or town hall. To be eligible to be considered the ballots must reach your local election office by the close of Election Day.

Respondents for the PFP poll stated “being too busy to vote” as one of the primary reasons for the voter drop off. Instituting no excuse absentee balloting with no need to reapply would make it easier for Black voters to cast a ballot (and every voter). This would not address Black voters’ distrust of voting by mail Reuters reports that “during the most recent national elections, the 2018 congressional midterms, only about 11% of black voters cast their ballots by mail, according to Census figures. That’s the lowest percentage of any measured ethnic group, and it’s just under half the rate of white voters.” Advocates in Massachusetts saw vote by mail utilized at higher rates by White and wealthy municipalities.

Expanding early in-person voting

This would give voters a longer window to vote early. The ACLU says that since 2011 states that have implemented policies to cut early voting law have used them specifically to suppress Black votes. While more research is needed, current literature and data says that early voting does bring in more Black voters. In 2020, Black voters were most likely to vote early of any demographic, with a 25% increase from 2016. In 2022, by passing the VOTES Act, Massachusetts permanently instituted early voting.

Publicizing Voting Access to Incarcerated and Previously Incarcerated People

Black voters face disenfranchisement due to rules disqualifying those with felonies or convictions from voting. Massachusetts does not restrict the formerly incarcerated from voting, but many people who fall in this group are not aware of their rights.

Voting centers

These are alternative to traditional, neighborhood based precincts that allow voters to vote anywhere. Massachusetts does not currently allow this strategy; residents must vote in-person at their precinct polling location or else by mail.