Why I Hate National Voter Registration Day
Register to vote, but get mad that you do this busywork because someone doesn't want you to vote
National Voter Registration Day is upon us again. This is a good time to register to vote if you need to and to update your registration if you have recently moved.
I hate National Voter Registration Day.
I say that as a member of the advisory board of the Non-Profit Voter Engagement Network, which created National Voter Registration Day.
I hate National Voter Registration Day for what voter registration represents: busywork that is so engrained into our culture that we accept it without questioning why we have to register to vote, and the consequences of voter registration on our elections.
The United States did not always have voter registration. At the country’s founding, governments maintained lists of those who were eligible to vote — primarily White men who owned a requisite amount of property. Property lists served as voter registration rolls.
It’s not like we need voter registration today. North Dakota does not have voter registration. All eligible voters who show their required identification are allowed to vote. Don’t believe me? Check out how they vote in North Dakota. North Dakota is in good company. Most advanced democracies in the world just require voters to show their government-issued identification when they vote.
So, if we didn’t have voter registration at the founding of the country, and North Dakota does not have it today, why do we have voter registration? The answer is simple: someone hopes that registering will dissuade you from voting.
As recounted by historian Alexander Keyssar in his excellent book, The Right to Vote, voter registration was first adopted in Northern states during the 1850’s at the height of the Know-Nothing Party, an anti-immigration political movement. When Northern states adopted voter registration, they specifically targeted the large cities as requiring voter registration while exempting rural regions. As late as 2000, Wisconsin still had a dual system that required voter registration except for smaller towns and cities. The given rationale for voter registration was to prevent vote fraud — fraud allegedly perpetuated by political rivals. Sound familiar?
After the Civil War, Southern states saw voter registration in the North and liked what they saw. Voter registration could serve as a tool to suppress the African-American vote by outright denying Blacks from registering during Jim Crow. During the Civil Rights movement, people were killed for trying to empower African-Americans by registering them to vote. (Please take a sobering moment to click on this link.) It would take federal government intervention through the powers granted by the Voting Rights Act to stop practices meant to deny Blacks from registering and voting.
Today, voter registration still serves as an additional cost of voting, which deters some people from voting. Over the years, the federal government and states have experimented with laws and policies to increase voter registration.
At the federal level, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (a.k.a. “Motor Voter”) requires states to provide voter registration opportunities at drivers license and public assistance offices. Motor Voter also proscribes how states may remove voters from registration lists, a procedure that begins if a registered voter has not voted in the last two general elections.
States have experimented with innovations such as Same Day Registration (allowing people to register and vote at the same time), online voter registration, and automatic registration (whereby people are registered automatically when they interact with an agency spelled out in Motor Voter). Yet, as much as these innovations are designed to tear down voter registration barriers, problems remain in that not all states have implemented them. Furthermore, some people simply don’t have a need to interact with Motor Voter agencies — they may not have a drivers license because they don’t own a car — or may simply choose not to vote for a period of time and thereby find themselves removed from the voter registration lists.
We are left then with a maze of voter registration. A maze that unfortunately traps some people into inadvertently registering when they should not, such as some Florida felons, who wouldn’t know they were ineligible because Florida does not maintain information whether or not they had paid off any required fines, fees, or restitution. A maze that enables bad actors to submit fake voter registrations to get paid, yes, even Republican operatives.
The Founding Fathers had the right solution: have the government issue an identification card for everyone. Make it free and easily accessible. And make it count as voter registration so that we may bid farewell to National Voter Registration Day.