Big changes to our voter registration tool
On August 30, we 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 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.
Things are about to get a bit nerdy, so please bear with me:
- 37 states and the District of Columbia offer online voter registration
- Numerous studies have shown that online voter registration increases voter registration rates while reducing election administration costs
- Online voter registration is a wonderful convenience with one minor hitch: in all but four states you need a driver’s license to register to vote online.
- This requirement exists because Americans need to have a “signature on file” with the state DMV to register to vote online.
- Americans who don’t have driver’s licenses, or who live in states that don’t offer online voter registration (looking at you, Texas) need to print and mail their voter registration forms
- Which would be fine if Americans owned printers. Home printer ownership has been in the single digits since 2011, which was the last time Hewlett Packard was willing to publish statistics on home printer ownership.
- At the same time, fewer and fewer Americans are getting drivers licenses.
- Only 54% of 18 year olds currently have driver’s licenses. 20 years ago that number was 75%. Lyft and Uber have already had an impact on driver’s license applications, and autonomous vehicles will have an even greater effect.
What we have right now is a perfect storm of inaccessibility. Americans need either a driver’s license or a home printer to register to vote, and increasingly Americans have neither.
The people who are most likely to be disenfranchised by all of this are Black, Latinx, low income, and young voters.
That’s where our “esign” work comes in. We realized certain states allow voters to submit their registrations by fax or email, which means that these states already 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 print and mail a form. For the Local Election Official, nothing changes. They still receive a signed paper voter registration form, only this one is neatly typed and filled out properly.
Tools like this bring us one step closer to our vision of an electorate that is as diverse as the population at large. So far, we’ve launched in Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, and South Carolina. We expect to launch in a few more states over the next two weeks.
You can see screenshots of the new workflow here. And you can expect even better updates from us in the weeks ahead.
As always, our tools are free to use. You can embed our tools on your websites using a single line of code, just like you embed a youtube video. You can grab the code here: www.vote.org/technology/.
Thank you,
Debra Cleaver
Founder and CEO, Vote.org
