features
fall 2024
By Michael Fisch
When third-year law student Amber Magee teaches other Suffolk Law students how to register to vote, obtain an absentee ballot, or figure out the basics of a ballot question, she thinks about her grandfather. As a Black man in Mississippi, he was denied the right to vote for much of his life, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed racial discrimination in local, state, and federal elections.
“Seventy years ago, I wouldn’t have had my voice heard,” Magee says. “Some people say it doesn’t matter whether you vote. I say you can’t be complacent.”
Suffolk’s Law Student Bar Association, which functions as the Law School’s student government association, is partnering with Suffolk Votes during the election season. Magee, the Student Bar Association's chief justice, is “training the trainers”—helping ten or so fellow law students learn how to teach others about the ins and outs of voter registration. International students help, too, she says, serving as interpreters at polling places or assisting voters with disabilities.
Joe Piemonte, BS ’19, MPA ’20, the bar association’s vice president and a fourth-year evening law student, says his interest in voter education and registration goes back to research he conducted in preparation to cast his own first vote.
Back then, as a Suffolk undergrad, Piemonte discovered that Amtrak only scheduled a single daily train between Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts. That made trips to visit his parents in nearby East Longmeadow impossible to schedule. Like other east-west commuters without good public transportation options, he and many of his friends and acquaintances drove instead, fighting through the Boston traffic.
Voting, he says, gave him the sense that he could be the change he wanted to see, helping Massachusetts increase rail options and reduce gridlock on Boston highways. As a project coordinator for the MBTA, he’s spent the past three years helping to develop a new rail line to the state’s south coast.
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