Same Day Registration

A few quick hits for a Saturday morning:

• Rock the Vote and Working Assets have unveiled their voter registration widget. By the end of the summer it is supposed to be portable to any website, blog or social network. This could be huge for online voter registration in 2008.
• The North Carolina General Assembly has passed a same day registration bill that will let voters register and vote on the same day up to three days before the election. The bill is awaiting the Governor's signature. Read our previous coverage of this here.(h/t Rock the Vote blog)
• Democrats Work is teaming up the Young Democrats to host a community service operation during the YDA Convention in Dallas. The groups will assemble back to school backpacks for the children of soldiers deployed in Iraq. Sign up here.
• AlterNet reports on the Bush Campaign's anti-protestor advance manual. The handbook outlines tactics for sidelining protestors and marks Young/College Republicans, local sororities/fraternities, and local athletic teams as footsoldiers to do the dirty work.

Conventional wisdom states that low turnout rates are evidence that young people are less engaged than older Americans in civic life.  Yet with high rates of volunteerism and increasing engagement, this is clearly wrong.  Something else is going on.  As the Brennan Center, Demos, and even Rolling Stone have ably chronicled, young people - particularly students - face high barriers to entry for participating in the political process.

Since the 1970's and 80's, many university towns - particularly small towns in rural areas, where the students vastly outnumber local populations - have actively sought to disenfranchise students.  This has taken a variety of forms including closing polling places on campuses, declaring dormitories to be ineligible as a "permanent places of residence," and regulations necessitating that a student's place of residence and drivers license address match - a near impossibility for students.  Barriers like these are compounded by a problem that all young people typically face - we are a highly mobile bunch, switching residences, towns, even states from year to year as we jump jobs and apartments.  

If we want young people participating in politics, we should work to ensure that the system actually encourages and facilitates that participation.  One way to do that is Election Day Registration.  To be sure, it won't solve all of the problems I mentioned that prevent young people from voting, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.

In 2006, seven states employed Election Day Registration - Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming. According to Demos (pdf), those seven states consistently see some of the highest rates of turnout in the country (see graph below).  In 2006, turnout in EDR states was 48.7% vs. an average of 38.2% in non EDR states.  

Switching back to young voters, it is estimated that Election Day Registration could increase youth turnout by as much as 14%.  To put that into perspective, the massive turnout increase among young voters that we saw in 2004 represented only an 11% overall increase. If we had EDR in all 50 states, and young voters continued to vote 2-1 in favor of Democrats, we'd likely see a Democratic landslide that would dwarf last year's blue wave.  

Via Jonathan Singer at MyDD, I just learned that the governor of Iowa has signed legislation instituting same-day voter registration.

This is huge.

Same day registration is one of the most effective ways (pdf) to increase young voter turnout. The six states that already use same day registration consistently see some of the highest turnout rates among young voters:

Six states—New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Idaho—have same-day registration, which allows eligible citizens to register at their neighborhood polling station on Election Day. North Dakota has no registration requirement, in effect making it a same-day registration state. These states are among the leaders in turnout rate and even more so when young-adult turnout is the benchmark. Same-day registration increases the likelihood that citizens will know when, where, and how to register, and it accommodates those individuals who have recently changed residence. For young adults, these advantages are considerable.

Demos estimates (pdf) that same day registration could increase young voter turnout in Iowa by as much as 10.7%.

I'm not really sure what this means in terms of the caucus. If this makes more people eligible for the caucus, and more likely to attend, that means potentially a lot more power for young people early in the nominating process. And even if it doesn't, it's huge none the less. The more that states adopt this as the standard, the more open our elections become, the more young people participate. The more that happens, the quicker we'll kill the "apathetic meme" and get an equal share of attention and influence among our officials.