The free and fair exercise of our right to vote is the foundation of our democracy and the American experiment. Too often we take our right for granted, forgetting how groundbreaking it was when voting was enshrined in our founding documents, and how hard we have had to fight to protect and gradually expand that right to all Americans, including women and people of color.

Recently, the Maine House of Representatives took another small step forward along that long slow road to full democracy. They voted in favor of a bill (LD 1232) directing the office of the Secretary of State to study a system of automatic voter registration in use in other states and make a recommendation to the Legislature next year about whether and how best to implement it in Maine