Ask your state legislators to introduce or support innovative legislation to boost democracy in the coming year. We've highlighted six proposals that states can undertake to promote election reform in 2007.

• 16 Year-Old Voter Pre-Registration (Rhode Island Model)
• State Universal Voter Registration Proposal (Driver's Insurance/Health Care Model)
• Instant Runoff Voting Statewide Pilot Legislation (North Carolina Model)
• Instant Runoff Voting to Replace Primaries (Pierce County, Washington Model)
• State Voting Rights Act Proposal (California Model)
• National Popular Vote Plan for Presidential Elections (50-State Plan)

In February of 2007, a range of civil rights groups united to advance a federal legislative agenda on voting rights and electoral reform. A key provision that the diverse array of groups endorsed was a call to Congress to help ensure that voting equipment would be flexible enough to conduct cumulative voting and ranked choice elections:

"Transparent and trustworthy technology guidelines. Congress should ban radio frequency wireless components in all voting systems.  Congress should address the problem many states experience in gaining access to the firmware or software on their own voting machines by ending the exclusive private control that many vendors have over the code on machines owned by local jurisdictions.  To the extent possible, Congress should encourage voting systems that are ready to run elections with election methods currently used in elections in the United States, including cumulative voting and ranked choice systems."

This critical step was endorsed by the following groups:

Anti-Defamation League
Asian American Justice Center
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
Common Cause
Demos
FairVote
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL)
MassVote
Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition
NAACP
National Congress of American Indians
National Council of Jewish Women
National Disability Rights Network (NDRN)
National Education Association
People for the American Way (PFAW)
Project Vote
Rock the Vote
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
The Arc of the United States
United Cerebral Palsy
U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG)
United States Student Association (USSA)
VerifiedVoting.org

The entire federal legislative agenda for 2007 can be downloaded [HERE].