Jay Newton: Time to make voting easier and more modern

To The Daily Sun,

It's time to improve the way we vote.

In 2020 we had a pandemic and national and state elections. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, those elections went very well with the results certified by the Secretary of State and the governor. That’s good but not good enough.

We can do better! Forty years ago, if you wanted to heat up left-overs, you put them in a pan and heated them up carefully and slowly on the stove so you wouldn’t burn them. Now we use a microwave.

We had nearly 100,000 of our 814,000 voters in the state register vote on election day. Same day registration is a convenient provision of our state election system. It is important because it enables people that may have just been too busy to register earlier in the year to still participate in our democracy. But those voters still had to arrange child care, get out of work early, ask for time off, risk exposure to COVID-19 and then wait in a special longer line to get registered before they could vote.

We can do better! In an age where you can order something with a click of a button and get it tomorrow, we shouldn’t have to wait in line to register and vote. There are proven ways such as motor voter registration (get automatically registered to vote when you register your car), vote by mail and early voting to make these tasks easier like many other things in our modern lives.

HR 1 and S 1 are bills currently in the U.S. House and Senate that mandate these common-sense updates to voting processes for the entire country so we all have an equal chance to vote.

We should be proud that we have a high level of voter turnout in NH. We topped 73 percent in 2020 which is good but that means that 293,000 people, or 27 percent, of NH residents did not vote. Some people may have chosen not to, but many may have been working, be disabled, had a lack of childcare or have been ill that day.

We can do better! You don’t need to go over to your friend’s house to play video games, you can meet them online. If those voters had been registered automatically when their car was registered and had been sent a mail-in ballot, they might have voted and that means that our elected officials would know that every last NH citizen that is 18 years or older is paying attention.

While I’m happy that it is easier to game these days, gaming is not a constitutional right, but voting is! Making voting more modern and easier just makes sense. We are still voting they way they did in the 1950s.

In addition to making it easier to register and vote, HR and S 1 strengthen campaign finance laws, improve security and counter foreign interference in our elections.

Let our senators, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, know "We can do better! Please pass HR 1 and S 1."

Jay Newton

Gilford