Should Voter Registration Be Automatic?

Every four years, American citizens face a huge responsibility: choosing the next U.S. president. Yet voter turnout has been low for decades. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, only about 60 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

How can we get more Americans to participate in our democracy? One key way, some people say, would be making it easier to register to vote.

To cast a ballot, Americans need to have registered in advance—in some states, months beforehand. In most cases, people can register online at vote.gov, through the mail, or in person at a state government agency.

Instead of putting that burden on citizens, a few states have started automatically registering people to vote when they apply for a driver’s license through the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Supporters of this system say that it’s fast and easy—and should be adopted nationwide.

But opponents of expanding the use of automatic voter registration across the country argue that it won’t fix low voter turnout. Being registered, they say, is no guarantee that people will actually make the effort to vote.

Should more states implement automatic voter registration? Two experts weigh in.

Voting is the foundation of American democracy, and registering to vote is one of the first steps toward participating. Registering shouldn’t be a barrier to electing representatives or supporting policies we believe in. That’s why we should make voter registration automatic in every state.

Here’s how the process works: When people get or renew their driver’s license, the DMV informs them that their name, birth date, address, and other personal information will be used to register them to vote (unless they say they don’t want to register). Each person’s information is then electronically transferred to election officials.

This streamlined process saves states money, makes voter lists more accurate (in part by reducing errors caused by processing paper forms by hand), and could help register 50 million additional voters across the country.

In 2016, Oregon became the first state in the nation to start registering voters automatically. As a result, more than 390,000 new voters were registered. And in the 2018 midterm election, 68 percent of Oregon’s eligible voters cast ballots—up from 53 percent in the previous midterm election. So far, 16 states and the District of Columbia have approved using this approach to register eligible voters.

The government should make registering to vote as simple and fast as possible. Unfortunately, the current process in many states is much more complicated than it needs to be. Expanding the use of automatic voter registration would make it easier for people across the country to vote—and therefore would improve American democracy. It’s already working in some states. Let’s adopt it nationwide.

—MYRNA PÉREZ
Director, Voting Rights & Elections Program, Brennan Center for Justice

Most Americans agree that voter turnout is lower than it should be. But expanding automatic voter registration will do little to fix that problem.

About one-third of states already have some form of automatic voter registration. Some have seen an increase in the number of registered voters. But there’s little evidence it has caused a spike in turnout rates—and that’s the measure that really matters.

Expanding the use of automatic voter registration won’t make a big impact, because it targets the wrong problem. The issue isn’t that there are too many barriers to casting a ballot. The main reason so many Americans don’t vote is that they think voting isn’t important.

People should be willing to put up with some degree of inconvenience to exercise their right to vote. This is, after all, a right for which countless people have fought and died throughout the centuries. In some countries, people aren’t allowed to vote at all. Yet many Americans who would wait hours in line at an Apple store to buy the new iPhone won’t wait 30 minutes outside a voting booth to cast a ballot.

More Americans should think of registering as an important aspect of the democratic process—and a key part of their civic duty. Rather than debating whether to institute automatic voter registration nationwide, we should do a better job of encouraging all eligible voters to cast ballots—and making sure they understand why voting is important in the first place.

We’re thinking about civic participation the wrong way if we’re focused on formal barriers to voting instead of the barriers we create ourselves by not stepping up and exercising our right to vote.

—Stephen Eide 
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research