We Found a Way to Increase Voter Turnout in Texas, but Texas Isn’t Interested

Contradicting its own election code, Texas rejects thousands of voter registration forms mere days before the deadline

Photo: Hill Street Studios/Blend Images/Getty Images

On August 30, Vote.org rolled out the biggest upgrade to our voter registration tool since 2016. Internally we refer to it as “esign” because it involves capturing electronic signatures and applying them to voter forms. Externally, we’ve effectively created “online” voter registration for citizens who can’t register to vote online — either because they live in a state that doesn’t have online voter registration, or because they don’t have a driver’s license.

This is nerdy, so bear with me:

• We realized certain states allow voters to submit their registrations by fax or email, which means that these states accept electronic signatures.
• We built a new feature on top of our existing voter registration tool that lets voters “sign” their forms by taking a picture of their signature.
• We then affix their signature to their voter registration form and allow them to submit their signed form via fax using the Vote.org fax API.
• For the voter, the process is entirely “online” in that they never need to…