Voting is a Right and Trump is Wrong — It is Time for Automatic Voter Registration

By: David Rini, NLC Boston Co-Director, & Nikki Fisher, NLC Portland Co-Director

On Thursday, May 11th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to dig deeper into speculations about voter fraud. Vice President Pence will chair the committee, and notorious voter-suppression advocate and Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, was named as vice chair. The commission’s charter is to investigate the impact of alleged improper voting or fraudulent votes, of which there is scant (or no) evidence. The President and Vice President are spending time and resources conjuring up an imaginary voting problem instead of focusing on a real one: low voter turnout.

Hardly the “massive landslide victory” the President has claimed, Trump won the election with support from only one third of the voting populace — not a majority. These numbers are in line with other non-outlier election years; 60 percent of the eligible populace turns up to vote. Many factors influence voter participation; enthusiasm about the candidates, voter suppression, and voter intimidation all play a role. But taking a step back, many eligible voters do not participate because they are not registered. A Demos study from 2009 determined that 51 million eligible voters, about 24% of the total eligible population, weren’t registered.

In most states, eligible citizens need to take action to register to vote. Those without the flexibility in their schedule, convenient registration location, or the understanding of how to register to vote — disproportionately the young, low-income, and people of color — are left behind in our electoral process. Some states are taking active steps to take people off of voter lists — purging names for inactivity, duplicate records, and changing addresses. While it’s important to have clean, accurate voter registration information, in some cases names are purged by accident. In Georgia, an unreliable system culled over 42,000 voters from the rolls for small typographical errors — things like misplaced apostrophes or incorrectly hyphenated last names.

Further, while many of these purging techniques are intended to be neutral mechanisms for keeping voter information accurate, they have a disproportionate impact on the poor, people of color, and young people — all of whom might not have stable address information.

Oregon’s successful implementation of automatic voter registration (AVR) for the 2016 election can show the rest of the country a way to combat low voter turnout. Oregon is one of the six states and the District of Columbia that has passed AVR legislation, but it was the first state to implement the system.

The system works so that any time a citizen goes to the DMV to get a driver’s license, renew one, or take a couple of other basic actions, they can use this same information to automatically register to vote, unless they prefer to not to be registered.

Results from Oregon’s AVR project so far are incredibly positive with almost 100,000 new registrants turning out to vote in the November 2016 election. Not only did it modernize our election system, but it also increased voter turnout in the 2016 election. Voters were enthusiastic about the system, which takes away some of the red tape that makes it challenging to maintain a voter registration. And we know that when voters are registered, they participate.

The law has helped pave the way for better voter record infrastructure — electronic databases that could use sophisticated record matching software — that would cut down on costs and errors when maintaining voter records over time. Now, every time someone interacts with the DMV in Oregon, their records are updated to include the most accurate address information — even for voters that have already registered. This helps us to have the most up-to-date voter rolls, without the costly exercise of purging the rolls.

Data found that young voter turnout increased over 6%. The results are in and one thing is for certain: implementing automatic voter registration has a positive effect on voter turnout. Oregon can — and should — be an example for the rest of the country on how to protect the constitutional right of all eligible Americans to participate in our elections.

The president has his calculus all wrong: we don’t increase public faith in elections by finding new and more draconian ways to remove people from voter rolls. We get more security, and have more faith in elections, when all eligible Americans have an opportunity to have their voices heard in our elections. Oregon’s experience with AVR so far shows substantial promise. Now it’s time for other states to follow suit.

Nikki Fisher is the Co-Director of New Leaders Council Portland and the executive director of the Bus Project, an Oregon nonprofit dedicated to engaging youth in democracy. Dave Rini is the Co-Director of New Leaders Council Boston, and the Prison Rape Elimination Act Project Coordinator at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.