LWVCCA Voter Service Committee Promotes voter registration and active, knowledgeable voter participation in government.

Co-chairs: Rosemary Shields, Lynne Pleffner

As you know, the League is dedicated to advancing democracy. Our democracy is only as strong as we make it, and the greatest tool, privilege and responsibility we have is voting.

Our Committee's role is:

• to raise the visibility of local elections,
• conduct get-out-the vote-events,
• arrange candidate forums,
• and educate citizens on important voter information such as Automatic Voter Registration, early voting, and voting through absentee ballot.

To begin, I'll tell you about our activities on Cape Cod in 2019, and then about how you can participate this year and in 2020.

Last year, thanks to 20 volunteers, we set up tables to register voters at 24 events across the Cape. Some volunteers worked at one event, others participated in several.

Examples of the types of events were:

• an Orleans family Wellness Fair
• Brewster Farmers Market,
• the Hyannis Stop & Shop in Hyannis,
• the Barnstable Sr. Center,
• the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis,
• "Monday's on Main St" in Chatham,
• and - in partnership with Youth Services - schools in towns including Mashpee, Dennis, Harwich and Eastham.
  All together, we registered or preregistered 291 people. Also at these events, we provided information about preregistering at age 16, early voting, important dates such as deadlines for registering & voting dates, absentee ballots and flyers with information about candidate forums and other voter information events.

We believe that our community presence helped remind people that midterm elections were coming up. Also it was fun to interact with people of all ages from of all walks of life.
On the national level, we participated in National Voter Registration Day on September 25. Across the country, 400 LWV Chapters (including ours] in 47 states mobilized 4,318 volunteers who offered eligible citizens the opportunity to register, and registered over 800,000 new voters!
Stepping back to the local scene, the role of our Voter Service Committee is changing this year because Massachusetts passed the Automatic Voter Registration Act. AVR means that eligible voters can automatically register when they apply to get or renew their drivers license or sign up for a state program such as Medicaid. As a result, in 2019 and 2020 we will transition from registering voters to voter information events such as candidate forums and forums to explain ballot questions....and will talk about how you can participate!