It used to be a different story. Before the Motor Voter Law, any group that wanted to conduct a "get out the vote" drive first had to contend with the difficulties of mounting an effective "get people to register" drive. Since only official city or town registrars could register people to vote, that meant either people had to take the time to go down to their city or town hall to register or an organization had to make arrangements to get a registrar to come out to some event the group was sponsoring and be on hand to register people attending that event. In any case, it just wasn't a convenient process. All that changed with the passage of the NVRA, which required states to make it possible for people to register when getting a driver's license, when visiting other government agencies, or by mail. It's this provision for mail-in registration that adult education programs and their sponsoring agencies can take advantage of.
The first thing your agency needs to do is to get a supply of Mail-In Voter Registration Forms from your city or town hall or from the Massachusetts Secretary of State's office, at One Ashburton Place, Room 1705, in Boston. You need to get a good supply of the actual forms, since photocopies of the form are not allowed. The form is available in a number of languages besides English, including Chinese, Haitian Creole, Khmer, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Secondly, your agency needs to come up with the easiest and most efficient way of distributing the forms to students, people who come in to sign up for classes, anyone who comes through your doors. And you want to make sure that they do register, that they don't just take the form and forget about it or throw it away. Since it only takes a couple of minutes to complete the form, people should be encouraged to fill it out right away. You can facilitate this by providing them with assistance in completing the form and returning it. For example, you can provide the postage for returning the forms individually, or you can save postage by collecting the forms and either periodically mailing them back in bunches or hand- delivering them in a bundle to your city hall. Finally, you should do follow-up at election time to make sure people actually do vote. Adult education programs can make this sort of civic awareness and participation a part of their curriculum, by giving students opportunities to learn about how our government works and to discuss some of the issues prominent in that election. Of course, many people who don't vote believe that their vote doesn't matter, that voting doesn't make any difference, that they don't have the power to affect decisions that get made, and that politicians are all the same. Unfortunately, there is more than a kernel of truth in these beliefs, for, as William Grieder, among others, has recently documented in his book Who Will Tell the People?, economic power and those who have it usually exert a controlling influence over our government and our political system. Yet while acknowledging the importance of working to remove the color of money from our political picture, we need also recognize that votes can sometimes speak louder than dollars and that voting is one means by which the majority of people without economic power can influence what happens in this country.
Civic participation should be an aspect and a goal of every adult basic education program. The New England Adult Learner Voter Education, Registration, and Action (VERA) campaign is working to help programs do this; if your program is not already involved, you're urged to call Silja Kallenbach at the New England Literacy Resource Center, 482-9485, for information on how to join VERA. And the Voter Power project of the non- partisan Commonwealth Coalition is working to help community-based organizations take advantage of the Motor Voter Law to get people registered and voting; call them at 422-0118.
The United States lags behind the other "industrial democracies" in many of the demographic categories related to health, education, and social welfare. It may not be a coincidence that we also trail the pack in levels of political participation and voting. But adult education programs and the community agencies that sponsor them are now in a position to take some easy concrete steps to begin doing something about this, and we shouldn't pass up this opportunity.