Same Day Registration

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone." - Allen Raymond, former GOP operative

Voter fraud by individuals has been a major partisan debate in recent elections, inspiring multiple states to consider or pass laws that purport to stop it, including "no-match, no-vote" list maintenance procedures and strict voter ID  requirements. Despite federal findings that the act of casting an illegal ballot is exceedingly rare, partisans often cite large scale voter registration drives as voter fraud culprits, and perpetuate the myth of voter fraud by spreading the fear that such votes cancel out legitimate ones. With rising registration rates - particularly among historically underrepresented Americans - it is no surprise that partisans are spreading this myth, and the media often perpetuates the hysteria by printing stories on the small numbers of bad registration cards submitted by large scale voter registration drives (including the 1.2 million submitted by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN).

Despite the constant trickle of "voter fraud" scares in the media, however, it is becoming more evident that elections are more often compromised by systematic efforts to suppress eligible voters, including the very measures that are meant to protect against the extremely rare instances of ineligible voters attempting to cast a ballot. The real enemy to fair elections are organized voter suppression efforts that are seen in these poorly devised election laws, partisan dirty tricks, and systematic partisan efforts to challenge legitimate voters. From the alleged plan to challenge foreclosure victims in Michigan and Ohio to the potential "no-match, no-vote" fiascoes in Wisconsin and Florida, many Americans have cause to wonder, "will my vote count in November?"

On Monday, September 22, KCRW's To the Point host, Warren Olney, discussed voter fraud and voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election with Project Vote Executive Director Michael Slater, Doug Chapin of the Pew Center, former GOP strategist Allen Raymond, and Wall Street Journal columnist, John Fund.

In "major states like Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania" this year, Slater warned that we can expect some "election administration problems," which run the gamut from logistical issues, such as poorly distributed voting machines, to voter suppression tactics, including voter caging, which historically affect low income and minority communities. These communities, which have historically been systematically shut out of the electoral process, have shown signs of increased political interest and higher registration rates they year, prompting fears of increased partisan efforts to suppress this tidal wave of new voters.

Fund repeated stories of small numbers of allegedly invalid voter registration cards being submitted out of the more than 1.2 million turned in this year by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN, and said "some of these voter registration efforts have been questionable." But former GOP operative Allen Raymond, explained that there was a critical difference between a "systematic" voter suppression program "versus one that is part of the process." For one, he said, systematic efforts, like voter caging, are far more detrimental to election integrity than voter registration drive employees submitting bad applications.

Raymond was dismissive of the allegations against voter registration drives.

"Look, those are a couple of people who are just trying to earn a buck, collecting signatures. I've seen it all the time on ballot access petition efforts," he said of the voter registration fraud allegations. "I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone...and so I think what you really need to address are those systematic efforts," said Raymond.

Election Dirty Tricks

Raymond knows all about partisan use of systemic voter suppression efforts; he has written a book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which describes his years as a dirty-tricks specialist for the GOP. Raymond served time for a 2002 Republican phone jamming scheme. In a September 15 interview with the Michigan Messenger Raymond said "holding down Democratic turnout is a key part of Republican strategy for victory in November." Asked about reports of Republican attempts to challenge the voting rights of foreclosure victims, Raymond said that if he were still in the dirty-tricks business he "would be doing that all day long."

Other stories that have surfaced in recent weeks contribute to fears that partisans are ramping up their voter suppression machines. Last week, a mailer from the Republican National Committee that went to multiple registered Democrats in Florida left many confused about their party affiliation, according to Pam Fessler of NPR. While some Democratic officials consider the mailer an attempt to challenge voters based on returned mail, particularly Democratic senior citizens, Republican officials claim the confusion was not intentional and denied allegations of voter caging, according to the Naples Daily News on Sunday.

But in recent weeks several media and Internet outlets, including Air America, have reported on accounts of massive mailings of absentee ballots from the McCain campaign sent to registered Democrats and Obama supporters in other battleground states as well, including  Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; many of the mailings appear to contain the wrong preprinted return addresses for ballots, which would direct them to the wrong precinct.

Of even greater concern than dirty tricks is the possibility of voter suppression through election administration problems that are expected to run the gamut in key states.

No-Match, No-Vote

Voter advocates claim thousands of Wisconsin voters may "lose their right to vote" as a result of a lawsuit filed by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen just six weeks before the election.  Hollen, who sued the Government Accountability Board - which oversees elections in the state -  to "seek an order requiring the board to compare voter information to the Department of Transportation records for more voters," is being scrutinized for his ties to the McCain campaign (he is the campaign's co-chair in Wisconsin), according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Hollen hopes to quickly implement a notoriously faulty voter list maintenance system known as "no-match, no-vote," which experts say could result in purging eligible voters from the Wisconsin registration rolls. This system was found to incorrectly fail 22 percent of voters during an initial test in August (additionally, four out of six judges on the G.A.B. also failed to match the system). Under "no-match, no-vote", voters could mistakenly lose their registration as a result of "transposed digits, variations in names ("Becky" instead of "Rebecca," for instance) or poor handwriting on voter registration forms," the Journal-Sentinel reports. "Apt to fail are people with apostrophes, hyphens or spaces in their names. Voter records usually drop punctuation and spaces - 'ONeil' instead of 'O'Neil' - while driver's license records often keep them."

A similar practice is being enforced in Florida that could "turn Election Day 2008 in Florida into a catastrophe akin to the hanging-chads debacle of 2000," Florida Today editorialized this week. "With no time for troubleshooting the system, that could falsely disenfranchise many who've done nothing wrong." The state's dormant  2005 "no-match, no-vote" law was revived by Republican Secretary of State Kurt Browning in early September after challenges failed in court. Browning's decision to enforce this practice caused a critical uproar from voting rights activists, who claim such a move could disenfranchise thousands of Floridians, according to a Miami Herald report earlier this month.

"No-match, no-vote laws" are sold to the public as a way to prevent fraudulent voting, but as Florida Today correctly notes; "few people try to vote under someone else's name. A five-year hunt for voter fraud by the Justice Department under the Bush administration found almost no evidence of organized efforts to tilt national elections."

The Elections Supervisor of Leon County, Florida, Ion Sancho, is quoted in the Florida Today piece as saying that the real problem is not potential fraud by voters but partisan manipulation of the process. Sancho has been vocal about his opposition to the Florida laws he is required to enforce, including how the state makes eligible voters vulnerable to partisan challenges. Speaking on WGCU radio in Florida on September 12, Sancho told host Sasha Rethati that in the past ten years the Florida legislature had written rules to "make sure that the party in power could stay in power." He pointed to a 2005 Florida law that stripped the state's voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls, and how challengers now only needed to express a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot. "You can supply a list containing 10,000 names to the supervisor of elections," said Sancho, "and I have to make all 10,000 members vote by provisional ballot."

"What we have here is partisans attempting to use anything they can possibly find to gain an advantage on the other party," said Sancho. "Quite frankly, I'm fed up with it as an election official. The reason I came into this field was to make sure Americans had the right to vote, and to have their votes counted properly."



Quick Links:

Minnite, Lorraine. The Politics of Voter Fraud. Project Vote. March 2007.



In Other News:

Same-day voter signup getting serious look - Decatur Herald-Review [Ill.]

...Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, is investigating moving to same-day voter registration in two years. That means a person who was eligible to register but had not done so could walk into a polling place on Election Day, register to vote and be handed a ballot...

GOP: Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote - The Nation

Senator John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of the GOP's misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they encouraged.

Oklahoma election officials disagree with ACLU - Associated Press

State law prohibits former felons from registering to vote until the full length of their prescribed sentence has expired - even if they are not in prison and are no longer supervised by the Department of Corrections, the secretary of the state Election Board said Monday.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote's Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

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.