WASHINGTON — At least 35 million Americans who are eligible to vote are shut out of the democratic process because they aren’t registered. Can tweaking a 21-year-old law add millions of them to the voter rolls?
That’s the idea behind “automatic registration,” which five states have adopted and two dozen others have considered in the last two years.
Jonathan Brater of the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at the New York University School of Law, said voter ID laws may get more attention, but getting more Americans registered to vote could have the biggest impact on elections.
“Registration is one of the biggest barriers to voting,” Brater said. “Every election, thousands of people go to the polls and can’t vote because of complications with registration.”
Under the federal Motor Voter Act, which went into effect in 1995, states must offer to register any eligible citizen who seeks a new driver’s license or public assistance. But in many states, the law hasn’t fulfilled its potential, in part because the process often trips up would-be applicants and many state workers don’t consider it a high priority.
States that have switched to automatic registration don’t just offer people the opportunity to register — they go ahead and do it for them whenever an eligible voter applies for a license, without requiring the potential voter or a DMV clerk to take any additional action. People can opt out of registration, but they don’t have to opt in.
“Motor voter was always the homework we didn’t want to do,” said state Rep. Chris Pearson of the Vermont Progressive Party, who sponsored the legislation there. “Motor voter was never the focus of people at the DMV. This in a way turns it on its head. This isn’t, ‘Oh, I need to remember to ask them if they want to register to vote.’ This is about updating our system to make it automated.”
In 2015, Oregon became the first state to make the change. Already, automatic registration has added more than 200,000 people to the voter rolls in that state, an increase of nearly 10 percent.
Lawmakers in Vermont and West Virginia approved automatic registration this year, and Connecticut adopted it administratively.
Automatic registration is one of several strategies states are employing to enroll new voters. Thirty-one states now allow people to register online, and 13 have enacted same-day voter registration, which allows people to register on Election Day.
In states that don’t allow same-day registration, supporters of automatic registration say it will eliminate a common Election Day pitfall: people who arrive at the polls thinking they are registered, only to discover that they aren’t, or that they forgot to change their registration after a move.
As of September, 232,181 people had been automatically registered. That figure includes people who visited the DMV in 2014, 2015 or 2016. Eighty percent did not respond to the subsequent mailing, and were registered as unaffiliated voters. Of the 9 percent who responded and requested to be registered with a party, 11,991 asked to be registered as Democrats, while 9,223 registered as Republicans.
Only 8 percent of those who received the mailing opted out of registration.
Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins said she expects record-breaking participation in the general election in November. “Even if a smaller percentage of people who registered by this means participate than those who actively registered, there’s still more people voting,” she said.
Officials in Vermont and West Virginia envision automatic voter registration processes that rely heavily on technology. They point to Delaware, where since 2009 visitors to the DMV have been prompted to register to vote on touch screens.
Delaware’s process isn’t considered automatic registration because people are simply asked whether or not they’d like to register to vote. If they do want to register, they choose their party and attest to being eligible. It’s cheaper than Oregon’s system, said Elaine Manlove, the state’s election commissioner, because it avoids extra mailings.
“They’re always presented with the choice, which in my way of thinking is better because they have the option to opt out right there,” Manlove said. “We get the declination, or we get the party and when they leave there they are finished. They get their card in the mail the next day.”