It shouldn’t be a surprise that Hillary Rodham Clinton has tough words for Republicans. Not all of them will be as deserved as the brickbats she lobbed at them Thursday. ADVERTISING It shouldn’t be a surprise that Hillary Rodham Clinton
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Hillary Rodham Clinton has tough words for Republicans. Not all of them will be as deserved as the brickbats she lobbed at them Thursday.
“I call on Republicans at all levels of government with all manner of ambition to stop fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they’re so scared of letting citizens have their say,” she said in calling for a system of universal and automatic voter registration instead of pernicious new limits on the franchise.
Politicians have waged war on voting rights during the past several years, with Democrats trying to maximize access to the ballot box and Republicans attempting to limit it. …
GOP leaders justify their anti-voting agenda as an answer to voter fraud, but voter fraud is an imaginary problem. In fact, Republicans want fewer people to vote, especially fewer poor and minority people, because low turnout tends to favor the GOP, and poor and minority people tend to vote for Democrats. To be sure, Democrats have political incentives to increase turnout. But that doesn’t discredit the overriding logic that democracy is healthier when more people participate.
The debate about whether the government should make it harder to vote should give way to a discussion about how to maximize turnout. Some suggested mandatory voting, which is unrealistic and raises tough questions concerning liberty and conscience. Clinton’s universal registration idea is less radical and raises no such questions.
Voter registration has operated as a barrier to voting since states began instituting it in the 19th century. Though the Voting Rights Act and other measures ended the worst registration abuses, most of the country still uses a two-step voting process that requires opt-in registration followed by actual voting. Perhaps the least surprising research social scientists ever conducted found higher registration burdens lead to less voting. And there’s no good reason for them.
Some states already instituted same-day registration, merging registration and voting into the same session. American University’s Jan Leighley and New York University’s Jonathan Nagler found this produced a 6-percentage-point increase in turnout. Automatic registration should do better.
Automatically registered voters would get election information in the mail, encouraging them to vote, whereas same-day registration just helps those who already know when Election Day is and where their polling places are. Even Republicans should be attracted to the idea of more comprehensive, fraud-resistant voter rolls automatically filled and updated with information collected by DMVs, post offices, the Census Bureau or other government agencies.
Automatic registration is not a panacea. It wouldn’t result in anything like 100 percent turnout, especially for the country’s frequent non-presidential elections. If the system is left up to states, implementation would vary widely. A federally operated system would be better, though policymakers would have to ensure that federal officials can gather the needed information, and it’s hard to imagine Congress approving this approach.
But these caveats don’t detract from the idea’s merits. Oregon already is moving forward with universal registration. Other states should follow. If they don’t, Congress should push the policy forward.
— Washington Post
