The Allston Civic Association (ACA) met last week in a virtual setting, and President Tony D’Isidoro announced a new voter registration campaign aimed at increasing the district’s pull in the city.

Allston and Brighton comprise the City Council District 9, and as a single district it’s one of the most densely-populated areas of the city. It’s also close to many colleges and universities, and so has some of the highest rates of student population in the city, which, as a rule, don’t vote in local elections too often.

“The feeling is that’s one of the reasons we’re not being listened to – and I understand in the last election numbers were better – but we still have a long way to go in terms of active voters,” he said. “This election in the fall is extremely important with many contested elections and hopefully we have a good turnout, but we are going to – wherever we can and especially where we have in-person events – have information for people. It’s so easy to register nowadays. It’s really just [scan] a QR code, [and then] you go to the site and put in your information.”

D’Isidoro said the lack of registered voters and interest in local elections is one reason why the district is facing the loss of the Allston Post Office – in a population center similar to Newton’s entire square footage, which has 12 post offices – and the potential loss of the Jackson Mann Community Center rebuild project. He said it’s not the only reason, but a good way to reverse that trend is to make politicians nervous about their seat(s).

“A lot of the initiatives that we are going to engage in, and I started educating some people about it, is the fact that we’re going to try to launch a major voter registration drive in Allston-Brighton,” he said.

D’Isidoro quoted George P. Schultz, who first popularized the phrase, “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

“That infers that in order for democracy to work, it needs active engagement of all of us, and you can’t just sit on the sidelines and complain,” he said.

D’Isidoro said he’s already started and had some traction.

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“We just had a young professionals social at Broken Records a couple of weeks ago and we had a number of people come in and they signed up to register to vote with the hardcopy paper version, and it was really encouraging to see,” he said. “I encourage everybody, but especially if you’re in a nonprofit organization, the date is Aug. 22 for the primary, to really promote with people who attend your meetings and events to register to vote.”

Charlesview Director Jo-Ann Barbour said she wanted as many hard copies as she could to get older residents signed up too.

“We want to get those out to every place we possibly can,” she said. “I would put them out to our leasing office, our community center, we would send it out to other housing organizations, and other community organizations because not everybody is going to click on a QR code and do that,” she said. “So if we can do that with just a little information as to why it’s so important to vote in a number of different languages for folks who may not be as fluent in English, that would be great.”

D’Isidoro said voter participation makes politicians have to work harder for each vote, and when they do more, more comes back to those they represent.

“It’s not a good thing to have people coming out on top in an election because of low voter turnout,” he said. “That’s on us.”