A Big Day for Democracy in Washington
Automatic voter registration is gaining momentum.
Today, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee signed a slew of bills which will strengthen the right to vote in the Pacific Northwest.
These policies are needed badly right now in Washington. The state’s registered voting age population has been in decline for some time. In 1972, 86 percent of eligible adults were registered, but in 2016 that number was below 77 percent. There’s no way to rationalize that result.
The passage of Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) is a particularly exciting solution to increasing voter turnout in Washington. The policy failed to get out of committee in the last two legislative sessions, but now that Democrats control both the House and Senate action is finally being taken.
Washington is not alone in passing AVR. If anything they are a little bit late to the party. Oregon became the first state to pass an AVR bill in 2015, and in less than three years, eight other states plus DC have approved of the policy.
The success of AVR can be attributed, in part, to its simplicity. It works by (you guessed it!) automatically registering eligible citizens “who interact with certain government agencies” — like the Department of Motor Vehicles—to vote. These individuals are not hoodwinked into voting. It is not compulsory. People are notified of their voter registration through the mail and are given a period of time to be removed from the voting rolls. Even if this time period passes, there is always the option to decline registration.
It turns out, however, that very few people opt out. In Oregon’s case “only 6 percent of registrants” have chosen to do so. These newly registered voters used their civic power, too. Nearly half “of those automatically registered voted.” And 95 percent of those registered with Oregon’s AVR were first-time voters in the 2016 election.
Beyond general turnout, Oregon’s AVR law seems to be particularly effective in increasing millennial voting rates. According to Demos, “37 percent of automatically registered persons who voted for the first time in 2016 were between the ages of 18–29, compared to 13 percent of the non- AVR voters.” Predictably, people of color are also benefitting from an opt-out voting system, as the graph below shows.
These are exciting outcomes for voting rights. If marginalized communities and certain age groups do not vote, a government likely won’t represent those people. The more people we include in the political process, the better the outcomes will be for everyone. To paraphrase Lyndon B Johnson, a person without a vote is a person without protection.
Psychological analysis suggests as much:
Increased accountability will alter decision-making strategies. When expecting evaluation from an audience, people will think more carefully about their decisions than they normally would. They will consider the outcomes of their judgments and process the relevant information more deliberatively. Under low-accountability situations, people can process the relevant information superficially, knowing that any decision made will not be scrutinized.
The history of voter suppression in America writ large is really a story about accountability — or more precisely, the evasion of it. If the national motto were to embrace reality, it would read “out of the few, one.”
President Barack Obama recently acknowledged this truth on David Letterman’s new Netflix show, claiming “We’re the only advanced democracy that deliberately discourages people from voting.”
“Initially, there were a very small category of people who could vote,” Obama told Letterman. “White men with property, then expanded to white men without property, and then we kept on expanding the franchise[ment]…”
Begrudgingly, America’s voting system has become more inclusive, and by doing so, it has become a stronger nation. Still, far too many people are kept out of the voting booth. Predictably, socio-economic lines determine who is excluded. A Harvard University paper found that the “poor make up 55 percent of people who can’t vote (which include felons and immigrants as well as residents of Washington D.C., and U.S. territories).”
In nine states, Republican legislators have enacted laws that disenfranchise anyone with outstanding legal fees or court fines. For example, in Alabama more than 100,000 people who owe money — roughly 3 percent of the state’s voting-age population — have been struck from voting rolls.
We know that American politicians reflexively try and cocoon themselves from broad accountability by limiting who they must answer to at the ballot box. That’s why it is so important that states follow Washington’s lead and continue to empower all eligible citizens to vote. A more inclusive society is what we should be aiming for. AVR is a policy that helps achieve that.
