When More People Vote, We All Win
Why Automatic Voter Registration Will Make Washington State a More Inclusive Place
Every adult citizen of the United States should have the right to vote. It is exactly that—a right, not a privilege—and that right is at the core of what it means to be an American. To vote is to participate in the community, to act as the ultimate power in a finely balanced system of checks and balances, to establish the kind of future you want for yourself and your children.
The quest for inclusivity in America is perhaps best observed through the right to vote. In the beginning, only white male landowners granted themselves that power. But eventually, through wars and protests and years of hard work, that power was extended to Black Americans, to women, to Native Americans, and to every citizen from their eighteenth birthday until the day they die.
Here in Washington State, every adult who’s registered to vote receives their ballot in the mail about two and a half weeks before every election day. And that’s fantastic! When more people are included in the election process, we get better results from our elected leaders. Several pieces of legislation that are right now moving through the legislature in Olympia could make Washington one of the most inclusive electoral systems in the entire United States.
“I love democracy — it’s awesome, it’s exciting, it’s wonderful and messy,” Zach Hudgins, a state representative from the 11th District, tells me over the phone as he drives down to Olympia. Hudgins doesn’t just talk a good game when it comes to democracy. He’s volunteered to help ensure fair and accessible elections in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and “I went to Iraq in 2004 to help the Iraqi parliament get ready for their first election,” he tells me.
Why would he venture to some of the world’s most dangerous places to ensure someone else’s right to vote? “I truly believe elections work and democracy works,” Hudgins says. “I believe it’s messy and it’s unfair to the losers sometimes, but generally it’s an amazing way to run a system.”
It’s important for Hudgins that his state works as hard as possible to perfect its democracy. “I’ve been trying to identify and break down hurdles in voter participation and increase confidence in the system,” Hudgins tells me. There’s no single “silver bullet” solution, he says, but a bipartisan team of lawmakers in Olympia have been working on a wide array of legislation to make voting more inclusive and more transparent.
One example is HB 1507, a bill to enhance election reports which Hudgins worked on with a Republican from District 6, Representative Jeff Holy. And Trump-supporting Republican State Senator Kirk Pearson sponsored a law last year installing more ballot drop boxes around the state, which allow people to vote without paying for a stamp to mail their ballot. (This bipartisan drive to encourage voting isn’t just a deep-blue Washington State peculiarity; even Republican-run states like Wisconsin are passing laws to promote same-day voter registration.)
Hudgins is supporting and considering a number of bills, but most of them follow the same basic strategy: they transform voter registration from an opt-in system to an opt-out one. In Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) legislation that recently moved to the state Senate, any citizen who has the right to vote should be told about their right to vote at every point of contact with the government — particularly at the DoL. Nearly 80 percent of all voters are registered through motor voter laws, Hudgins explains, but the vast majority of newly licensed drivers in the state, at 16 and 17 years of age, are too young to vote. Hudgins is encouraging a solution which allows Washington residents to preregister when they get their license so that they automatically receive their first ballot in the mail after they turn 18.
“When we have low voter turnout,” Hudgins says, “we get officials who are less accountable. When we have higher turnout, we have officials who are more accountable.” in the end, he believes, we’re making our nation more perfect by including more and more voters. It’s a slow process, but one through which great things are possible.
Susan Mason, the Executive Director of the criminal justice reform organization What’s Next Washington, has a simple mantra to explain her policy on voting: “everybody in, nobody out!” Mason explains to me that her role at What’s Next is to continually remind Washington that “there’s a whole section of society we set out on the edges — mostly poor people, and people of color.”
Over 15 years ago, Mason served 15 months in prison. Once she left prison in 2003 she regained her right to vote. (If you’re a Washington state resident in federal prison, your right to vote is returned to you the minute you’re out. If you’re in Washington State prison, you have to go through probation before voting rights are restored.) But there’s a big hitch: “I didn’t vote until this last election because I didn’t know I could,” Mason tells me. “I could’ve voted in 2009 but I didn’t know. For a lot of years, I would say, ‘I can’t vote, I’m a felon,’ and nobody told me ‘yes you can.’”
Mason’s experience is not unique. “There’s so many of us who don’t know,” she says. For people who served time, she says, “the belief is that you can’t vote. During the last election when we were voting for the new mayor, I had a friend who said to me ‘I want to get my rights back and vote.’ I asked her how long she’d been off probation and she said 2001. She’s been out forever! She could’ve voted for years. This is a woman who owns a business, who had no blemishes on her record since her release. She’s an amazing human being and an amazing citizen who just didn’t know she had that right. “
“There are thousands and thousands of people in Washington State that don’t know they are eligible, that they didn’t lose their right to be a citizen,” Mason tells me. In a more transparent system under AVR, those disenfranchised voters would be told that they’re registered to vote when they update their license, or in other points of contact with the government.
Oskar Zambreno at the Latino Community Fund grew up in California. “My parents brought me here when I was 2 years old,” he says. Zambreno didn’t learn until sixth grade, after a class discussion of then-Governor Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187, that he wouldn’t have the right to vote as an adult if he remained undocumented.
“I asked my parents if they had papers and they said no. I went back to my teacher and told her my parents can’t vote.” Zambreno recalls telling his teacher that he felt helpless to fight Prop 187, but she reminded him that he had a voice. “She connected me with a local campaign. I started canvasing and phone banking in 6th grade. I learned the importance of voting and I learned that a lot of people who should be voting are not voting.” He calls it “a very personal issue,” even though he’s long since gained full citizenship.
For Zambreno, championing laws like AVR “is really about making people’s voices count and giving them another option.” He credits the Trump administration for unwittingly “waking up young people because we have family and friends who are undocumented.” Recently, Zambreno has noticed “a surge of people who wanted to go vote and they just couldn’t.” Preregistering young people for the vote, he says, “really helps. A lot of students don’t pay attention to the election until the week of the election, so having that pre-registration and same-day registration should help make voting more equitable.”
If you support Automatic Voter Registration, it’s important that you call your state Senator and urge them to pass AVR. As my coworker Jessyn Farrell pointed out earlier this week, even if you know your representative is on your side on the issue, your calls can help them decide which issues to prioritize this session.
But it’s also important to remember that there’s always more work to be done to include everyone in every election. All three of the people I interviewed for this piece discussed other ways to represent all of Washington, and not just the one-in-five King County residents who manage to turn in their ballots. From registration at birth to returning voting rights to prisoners to prepaid postage on mail-in ballots, there is no shortage of exciting ways to improve voter participation.
It’s all a part of our eternal quest to make a more perfect union. “Every time we try to fix something, we realize there’s something more,” Zambreno tells me. “I don’t think there’s a patch or a fix-all for this issue. We’ll find other hurdles. And we’ll address them when they arise.”
