Mimi Murray Digby Marziani, third from left at our 2012 kickoff, is joining the Why Tuesday? advisory board.

We are thrilled to announce Mimi Murray Digby Marziani is joining the Why Tuesday? advisory board. Mimi, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, participated in our 2012 kickoff event at the Newseum, “Creating the Voting Rights Act of 2012.” Her work on and knowledge of voting rights make an extraordinary addition to our team. Here’s Mimi’s bio:

Mimi Murray Digby Marziani serves as counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program where her work focuses on money in politics, voting rights and legislative dysfunction. (more…)

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I’d like to extend a warm welcome to columnist, blogger and author Meghan McCain, the newest member of the Why Tuesday? Advisory Board. As we dive into the 2012 election season our entire team is happy to have Meghan by our side as we fight the war against low voter turnout. Here’s a little bit more on Meghan, from her bio over at The Daily Beast:

Meghan McCain is a columnist for The Daily Beast. Originally from Phoenix, she graduated from Columbia University in 2007. She is a New York Times bestselling children’s author, previously wrote for Newsweek, and created the website mccainblogette.com. Her most recent book, Dirty Sexy Politics, was published in August 2010.

We’re very much looking forward to working with her!

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Forty three years ago last week Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Our group was literally founded to honor and further the work Dr. King and others undertook to ensure passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because nearly half a century after that law’s enactment, America ranks near the bottom of all nations in voter participation.

Dr. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, is a member of our advisory board and continues to fight for Dr. King’s principles to this day through his work as the chief executive officer of the King Center and vice chair-designate of the Drum Major Institute.

Martin Luther King III penned this blog post for the Huffington Post last week answering the question “What Would Dr. King Do Today?” and the first question he asks is about why we vote on Tuesday.

This week marks the anniversary of my father’s death. Many Americans observe this occasion by looking back at the ideals he fought for and gave his life to advance. I believe we should mark it by looking forward to how much further we can advance those ideals in our own lifetimes.

There is no doubt that America, and in fact the world, are better today in so many ways, thanks in part to our progress in living up to those ideals. We are witnessing peoples across the world throwing off repressive regimes, inspired both by Dr. Martin Luther King’s teachings of non-violent social change and the momentous step America itself took in overcoming our own history by electing a president who once could not even have voted in some of the states he carried. These developments are testament to the power of both my father’s principles, and America’s.

But while we can take well-earned satisfaction in how far we have come, there is still further we can go. In this period between another anniversary of my father’s passing and the anniversary this summer of the March on Washington and the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr., national memorial, we at the King Center in Atlanta and its affiliated policy organization, the Drum Major Institute here in New York City, are launching a national effort asking Americans to consider the following questions:

Have we removed all government-imposed barriers and inequities? While Americans have differing views on the role of government, we all recognize that everyone should be allowed to participate equally in that government, and that equal access to the ballot box is the foundation of all our freedoms. Yet governments across the country still impose requirements that effectively limit many Americans’ ability to vote: The outdated practice of holding elections in the middle of the work week — which stems from an agricultural era — cuts down the ability of many Americans to exercise their franchise. Some jurisdictions exacerbate this problem by closing the polls at an hour that most working people are just getting home from their jobs — if they’re fortunate to work only one. Some politicians are now talking of erecting additional hurdles. With one of the lowest rates of voter participation in the world, shouldn’t America today be promoting voting rather than hindering it?

To read Martin Luther King III’s entire blog post, click here. For more about Why Tuesday? and our mission, click here.

Photo of Martin Luther King III at Riverside Church in NYC via Lindsay Beyerstein on Flickr.

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Ambassador Andrew Young, co-founder of Why Tuesday?, is a former U.S. Congressman and mayor of Atlanta. This op-ed originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

Last week, American voters swept in a new crop of leaders, and once again brought change to Washington, DC. What has not changed, however, is the precariously low voter participation in our nation. This year barely more than 40 percent of eligible Americans voted, while more than a third of those who voted in 2008 stayed home. Our country should follow in the footsteps of the citizens of San Francisco, who voted to remove one of the biggest causes of low voter participation: voting on Tuesdays. The history of the civil rights movement deserves as much. Let me explain.

Forty-five years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson put on his coat, took his daughters by the hand, and went to the Capitol for a historic event that was his happiest day as an American — signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he sat with fountain pen in hand, surrounded by an unusual group of allies, from Everett Dirksen to Martin Luther King, LBJ made a prediction: “And every family across this great entire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today.”

The Voting Rights Act made a huge difference in peoples’ lives, confirming everyone’s right to vote — but that did not mean that those having the right would fulfill it by going to the voting booth. Sadly, “that short step into the voting booth and the greatest step for society” as Martin would herald, has gotten longer and longer, not shorter and shorter. Since 1968, the turnout of American voters in federal elections has gone down every single time save once. And now our nation ranks 139 out of 172 countries worldwide in voter turnout and dead last among the G8. The problem certainly isn’t the lack of resources; more money is spent in American elections by far than anywhere in the world. This year alone over $4 billion dollars will be spent hoping that 40,000,000 votes will be cast. That’s $100 per vote. How can we, the nation that created and nurtured modern democratic principles, expect other countries to see us as a model when we are such laggards in voter participation? (more…)

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Thanks to (pictured L-R backstage at the 92nd Street Y in NYC) Joe Trippi, CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Nancy Scola, and Steve Grove  for being a part of my 140 Characters Conference panel Fixing Our Voting System One Tweet At A Time. If you want to find out more about the work we do at Why Tuesday? and how you can get involved, click here.

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Today CSPAN launched a searchable online archive of video of all of their programs since 1987. Here’s the video of Why Tuesday? co-founder and board member Ambassador Andrew Young announcing the launch of our group in 2005, on the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he help author.

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