PA institutes automatic voter registration
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) announced this morning that “eligible voters getting a new driver’s license or ID card in Pennsylvania will now be automatically registered to vote,” reports NBC News.
Shapiro’s office issued a statement:
“Pennsylvania is the birthplace of our democracy, and as Governor, I’m committed to ensuring free and fair elections that allow every eligible voter to make their voice heard,” said Governor Josh Shapiro. “Automatic voter registration is a commonsense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars. Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age, and citizenship at the DMV – all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration. My Administration will keep taking innovative actions like this one to make government work better and more efficiently for all Pennsylvanians.”
The howls you hear outside belong to opponents of universal suffrage who believe the goal is to “bloat” voter rolls to boost Democratic turnout. Shapiro campaigned on implementing automatic voter registration (AVR).
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent adds:
An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.
[…]
By keeping a registration process in place while removing the need to affirmatively initiate it, studies show, AVR encourages democratic participation. AVR also tends to make voter rolls more accurate and more up to date.
Despite the right’s insistence that voter roll accuracy is critical to “election integrity,” GOP-led states are exiting the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the voter roll maintenance consortium, under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers. Election integrity is a right-wing marketing slogan for disguising efforts to undermine popular sovereignty.
Sargent continues:
Republicans at the state level have been gerrymandering, restricting ballot access and manipulating the rules of political competition for decades. But Trump has exacerbated these tendencies: Right now, Republicans in numerous states are responding to recent election losses by supercharging anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian tactics — even though evidence is mounting that people are growing accustomed to voting in defense of democracy.
That is encouraging at a time when democracy is under constant attack.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but a caveat about AVR. As part of an ongoing outreach effort to my local Hispanic/Latino community (designated HL in the state voter file), I surveyed multiple county precincts with concentrations of HL registrants.
Of the HL voters 45 and under, some unscientific observations. Note bolded section:
- About 60% of HL registrants 45 and under are registered unaffiliated.
- Only 9% report being born outside the U.S.; for another 18% birth_state is left blank.
- 35% of voters vote irregularly; women more than men by 3 to 2. (Many are presidential-year-only voters.)
- Of the nearly one-quarter (22%) of registrants who vote consistently, women outperform men by 2 to 1.
- Women and men who register but never vote (30%) do so about equally.
A local elections official suspects many of the non-voters register as an afterthought when prompted during a visit to the DMV or a social services agency, then forget about it. Registering them automatically could be even more invisible (depending on the style of AVR), even if citizens receive registration cards in the mail.
As the AVR study notes, while AVR “ultimately has a net positive effect on turnout,” new registrants “have a somewhat lower propensity to vote.”
Automatic registration is no panacea for boosting election participation. Outreach and voter engagement is key, especially since campaigns typically prioritize outreach to registrants with solid voting track records (the low-hanging fruit). What my limited survey in one population suggests is that many lower propensity registrants may not even remember they are registered by election time. They’ll need encouraging no matter their track record.