I’ve long been a proponent of getting more people to participate in the electoral process. Although some of my preferred ways of achieving this outcome may be very bold, I welcome smaller steps that move us towards the goal nonetheless. That’s why I was so pleased when I heard that Oregon’s new Governor, Kate Brown, pushed through a law that automatically registers people with drivers licences or state ID card to vote. In one fell swoop, the new law signed in by Kate Brown will add an estimated 300,000 new voters to the rolls, which should cut the number of unregistered voters by about 43%[1].
The way this works actually makes a ton of sense from an efficiency standpoint. When you apply for a licence or ID card, you are informing (and with the accompanying documents, proving to) your state government what your current address is. Whenever you move, you need to get a new ID, since you need your new address on it for it to be valid. Therefore, when someone either gets an ID for the first time, or when they move and update their ID subsequent times, they have to fill out a form with their state government, telling them where they live.
Coincidently, which elections you are eligible to vote for is based on where you live. The state government agency that processes licence applications is capturing almost everyone’s permanent residence in more or less real time. Therefore the state has always had the relevant information to determine which elections each of their residents are eligible to vote for, soley based on the data they've collected from drivers licence and ID card applications.
Instead of asking citizens to fill out another separate form to register to vote (which would include no extra information necessary to complete the voter registration process), what Oregon is doing is streamlining this process and simply creating or updating a person’s voter registration status when they get or update their ID. What this boils down to is government agencies sharing data, instead of mindlessly siloing themselves off from eachother. Not having to fill out extra forms just to vote is obviously better for citizens, and saves the government money because there are now less forms to process. Everyone wins.
It’s incredibly refreshing to see our leaders actually push towards enfranchising more people to vote. There is well funded and coordinated effort going on around this country to actively disenfranchise people. While it's noble that activists are fighting these attempts to curtail voting, all they can hope for is to strike down these new overly restrictive measures, and return to the status quo. In otherwords, they can either lose, or at best draw. A draw is unacceptable when voting levels are at 72 year lows. We need to be getting more people to vote, not just prevent efforts to supress voting even further from succeeding. What Kate Brown did to day is go on offense, and has shown everyone what an actual win for civic engagement looks like.
As great as this step is, Oregon is just one state, making a good effort at tackling one part (voter registration) of the larger problem of the lack of participation by our citizens in running our democracy. So much more work is needed to be done. Every single state with reasonable, forward thinking leaders, should immediately adopt Oregon’s innovative new law. We need to do everything we can to break down barriers to voting, and this is a great step. Kudos Kate Brown, Kudos indeed.
1. As of December 2014, Oregon had 2,186,971 registered voters out of an estimated 2,881,903 eligible voters leaving 694,932 unregistered voters, of which 300,000 is about 43%. ↩