Universal Voter Registration
Publications
Since the Florida election debacle in 2000 laid bare the way Americans cast and count votes, lawmakers and officials at federal, state, and local levels have made fitful progress toward building a modern and democratically inclusive election system. Too often, when it comes to voting rights, policymaking devolves into partisan hand-to-hand combat. The sweeping aspiration of a renewed democracy can be easily subsumed in arcane and technical arguments over election administration.
Today we have the opportunity for a major breakthrough for effective democracy. The 2008 election saw a record number of new voters. New technology and the implementation of new federal laws make it possible to vault over existing voter registration challenges. The United States can move to a system of automatic voter registration—a system where every eligible citizen is able to vote because the government has taken the steps to make it possible for them to be on the voter rolls, permanently. Citizens must take responsibility to vote—but government should do its part by clearing away obstacles to their full participation. Today’s voter registration system is one such obstacle.
In 2001, a commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford concluded, “The registration laws in force throughout the United States are among the world’s most demanding … [and are ] one reason why voter turnout in the United States is near the bottom of the developed world.” Currently, in nearly every state, eligible voters are not placed on electoral rolls unless they first take the initiative to register and otherwise satisfy state-imposed requirements for voter registration. Even after they have registered, voters must start the process all over again virtually every time they move. Most Americans take this system for granted, but it was not always this way, and it does not have to be this way forever. The result is a system where many eligible citizens are unable to vote. They fall off the rolls; they never sign up in the first place; they drift ever further away from electoral participation. Some fifty million eligible American citizens are not regis- tered to vote.
In this year, when surging citizen participation underscores the deep desire for a change in national direction, we see with renewed urgency the value in building a modern and fully participatory electoral system. In fact, the United States is one of the few industrialized democracies that places the onus for registration on the voter. In other democracies, the government facilitates voting instead of making it harder, by taking upon itself the responsibility to register eligible voters. Even in the United States, voter-initiated registration did not exist until the late nineteenth century. It was instituted then with the intention of suppressing unpopular voters, especially former slaves and new European immigrants, and it continues to disenfranchise many Americans to this day.
Fortunately, in part because of new federal laws, states have made it easier to register over the last several decades. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 struck down barriers to voter registration based on race, but did not itself require government to take more affirmative steps to encourage registration. Then, in 1993, President Clinton signed into law the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), popularly known as "motor voter." The law required government agencies such as departments of motor vehicles and public assistance offices to register voters. After the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA mandated that states maintain computerized voter databases at the state level, rather than county by county. But those reforms have come with an administrative cost. As long as the government continues to insist that citizens register themselves, opening up access means ceding more control to voters to determine when and how they register. Elections officials may be overwhelmed by the dual demands of processing registrations that come in at the last minute and planning for elections. If the system cannot keep up, votes inevitably will be lost.
An automatic voter registration system creates voter rolls that are as comprehensive as possible well in advance of Election Day and provides a fail-safe mechanism if an eligible voter shows up at the polls but cannot be found on the list. Such systems are routine in other countries. They use different techniques for building their lists, all of which have one thing in common: the government bears the burden of registering every eligible voter.
Federal action can begin to move the country toward this goal in short order. A system of automatic registration would build on existing policies and innovations undertaken by state and local officials. The next Congress can substantially speed up the process by:
- Establishing a national mandate for automatic voter registration;
- Providing federal funds for states taking steps toward automatic voter registration;
- Requiring “permanent voter registration” systems, so voters can register once and stay on the rolls when they move; and
- Requiring Election Day registration, so eligible voters whose names do not appear on the voter rolls can register and vote on the same day.
What is automatic voter registration?
In an automatic voter registration system, it would be the government's obligation to ensure that every eligible citizen was registered to vote. Individual citizens could opt out if they wished, but the registration process itself would no longer serve as a barrier to the right to vote.
Here are some of the important ways that federal policy can and should encourage the states to improve on the current voter registration system:
- Mandate that the states put systems in place that would phase in automatic voter registration, while preserving the states' ability to experiment with different systems.
- Require states to immediately implement permanent registration, so that voters wouldn't have to re-register if they moved within a state.
- Require states to implement Election Day registration, as a fail-safe mechanism for eligible voters missing from the voter rolls for any reason.
- Provide the funding that states would need to ensure that every eligible voter is registered.