Portland – A diverse coalition of advocates for seniors, students, and women have a special Memorial Day weekend message for lawmakers: Leave Maine’s voting laws alone.

The Maine House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on a proposal, sponsored by Speaker of the House Robert Nutting and Secretary of State Charles Summers, that would eliminate same day voter registration (or Election Day voter registration). The vote is expected to be extremely close.

“There are few activities more patriotic and none more fundamental to our democracy than voting,” said Shenna Bellows, Executive Director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union.  “We honor those who died defending our country by preserving the fundamental freedoms for which they sacrificed so much. It would be a shame to roll back broad public access to the right to vote.”

In 2010, 18,364 Maine voters registered to vote on Election Day. In 2008, 49,666 voters registered to vote on Election Day. The proposal before the legislature would require voters to register ahead of time in order to vote on Election Day.

“Election day registration is part of Maine’s vibrant democratic tradition,” said Sarah Standiford, Executive Director of the Maine Women’s Lobby. “Turning back the clock means more barriers to vote – especially for those in our communities who move frequently, including busy single moms, young women, and basically anyone who lives on the economic margins. ”

Same day voter registration was passed into law unanimously by the Maine State Legislature when it was last controlled by the Republicans in 1973.  At the time, Senator Elden H. Shute (R-Farmington) was the chief sponsor. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued an opinion in 1973 (303 A.2d 452), which appears to support same-day voter registration, stating that any durational residency requirement would be constitutionally permissible only as far as it was necessary for the actual process of registration.

Proponents of LD 1376 have suggested that the measures would eliminate voter fraud, but only two known cases of an individual voting twice have been identified in the past thirty years in Maine.

“Having worked to make the voting process easy for voters and manageable for poll workers alike, I know that our system is working well,” said John Smith, former Deputy Secretary of State. “Maine has secure, accurate and accessible elections.  There is no need to change a system that is not broken.”

In 1972, prior to adoption of same day voter registration, Maine ranked 21st in the country in voter turnout. In 2008, Maine had the third highest voter turn-out in the country. The only states to surpass Maine in voter turn-out in 2008, Minnesota and Wisconsin, also have Election Day voter registration.

LD 1376 is opposed by the AARP, Disability Rights Center, EqualityMaine, Homeless Voices for Justice, the League of Women Voters, the League of Young Voters, the Maine Civil Liberties Union, the Maine People’s Alliance, Maine Women’s Lobby, and Preble Street Resource Center.

Email your legislator now!

1.) Paid Sick Days Campaign

We kicked off the year in full force with an exciting new campaign for a critical protection: paid sick days. While, unfortunately, the bill did not make it through the legislature this year, significant advances were made by way of increasing public understanding and dialogue of the policy and demonstrating public support for this workplace standard.

A highlight from the campaign was when we partnered with the Maine People’s Alliance and MomsRising.org to deliver a heap of fortune cookies with personalized messages in support of paid sick days to the legislature. Why? Because healthy workplaces are worth a fortune!

What’s next? We’re not giving up! Right now, more than 200,000 Maine workers lack even a single paid sick day from work. Thousands of others risk discipline or termination simply for using time they’ve already earned. Maine Women’s Lobby will continue to work with the Maine Working Family Coalition to advance legislation to support working Mainers, including paid sick days.

Read all about it here – for all of our blog posts from the campaign.

2.) Lilly Ledbetter in Maine

Right now, the wage gap is at 77 cents to the dollar – which is to say that for every full dollar a male earns, a woman earns, on average, 77 cents. The plaintiff in the employment discrimination case Lilly Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. and namesake for the 2008 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Paid Act, Lilly is one of the nation’s foremost advocates for closing the wage gap. We were incredibly fortunate to have Lilly come to Maine and deliver an inspiring speech on her long-fought battle for equal pay. In the midst of our campaign for paid sick days, her passion and story were particularly inspirational for our work.

Check out some great photos from the event here.

3.) Safe Cosmetics

Toxic chemicals in my shampoo? Oh my! This year, the Maine Women’s Lobby’s sister organization, the Maine Women’s Policy Center, vamped up organizing with young women and worked to support the formation of a student-run group, Women Against Toxic Cosmetics Harm (WATCH). This group of 20 passionate young women worked together to advocate for needed political reform of our broken chemical safety system. In their first six months of operation, they successfully launched three creative and successful press events, conducted campus and community-wide public education, initiated online actions, organized in-district visits, and placed a number of opinion pieces in both campus and local newspapers.

In 2011, we will continue this work by engaging with student leaders and working with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England to create a statewide network of young women advocating for chemical safety reform.

For press clips, and videos from this work, click here.

4.) Elena Kagan

On August 5, with a 63-37 vote, the United States Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And this fall, three women took their seats together on the bench for the first time in United States history. The Maine Women’s Lobby was there all along working to engage Mainers in the process and to advocate for Kagan’s confirmation. We convened a coalition in support of the effort, organized watch parties across the state, and met with our Senators’ staffers. We want to sincerely thank Senators Snowe and Collins and all of our activists out there for making sure that Elena Kagan was confirmed as the fourth woman to join the bench in the Court’s 221-year history.

Read more about the confirmation process here.

5.) She Decides

This fall, the Maine Women’s Lobby launched a new campaign to make sure that women’s economic concerns were front and center this election year. SheDecides is a nonpartisan campaign to demonstrate the importance of women – particularly unmarried women – in the elections. SheDecides is our pocketbook agenda, and it’s a roadmap for candidates who want to speak to the economic reality of women’s lives.

We asked candidates to share where they stand on the minimum wage, paid sick days, family friendly workplaces, paycheck fairness, and access to jobs and education. And, we took those messages to the campaign trail. After holding a kick-off event on Women’s Equality Day, women in bright green SheDecides t-shirts were visible at forums across the state and earned coverage on WMTW and in the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Phoenix. We matched these on-the-ground efforts with online action—our activists generated 500 e-mails to ask candidates where they stood on our pocketbook agenda. Then, the SheDecides team knocked on doors and shared these answers with women voters by sending a voter education mailing to more than 14,000 women statewide. Check out www.SheDecides.org to learn more.

And, that ain’t all! As we gear up for the start of the new legislative session next week, look out for the SheDecides team! We’ll be brushing off those green t-shirts and heading to the legislature to advocate for Maine women!

Families support paid sick days at the Festival of Nations this summer:

Gay and lesbian families deliver postcards in support of marriage equality to the governor:

Children gathered at a demonstration against BPA in Kids products:

Girls Rocked the House (and Senate) at Girls day this Spring:

]]> http://www.mainewomen.org/blogs/2009/12/top-five-photos-of-2009/feed/ 0