Why I Hate National Voter Registration Day

National Voter Registration Day is upon us and it is time for my biennial screed against voter registration.

Register or update your registration if you need to, but do it knowing that you have to do this needless busywork because someone doesn’t want you to vote.

We take for granted that registering to vote is a necessary chore in a democracy. But this isn’t true. North Dakota doesn’t have voter registration. A prospective voter simply needs to show acceptable identification before they vote. That’s it.

North Dakota isn’t alone. In countries like the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, and Chile a state-issued identification card serves as voter registration. Indeed, at American’s founding there was no voter registration. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that states began piecemeal adopting it, starting in the northeast and continuing to spread across the nation up to the early 1900s.

As late as 2000, Wisconsin only required people living in larger cities to register to vote. It is here we can glean why states adopted voter registration. Much like Wisconsin, when the first northeastern states adopted voter registration it only applied to the larger cities. The anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party claimed voter registration was needed to prevent immigrants concentrated in the burgeoning coastal cities from illegally voting. Sound familiar?

During the Jim Crow era, Southern conservative Whites found another purpose for voter registration. They could deny African-Americans access to the ballot if they were never registered to begin with. To their shame, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled discriminatory voter registration practices were not a violation of the Fifteen Amendment.

States — both liberal and conservative — have made strides to mitigate voter registration. In the 1973, Maine became the first state to adopt same-day voter registration, where an eligible, but unregistered, voter can register and vote at the same time if they show the required identification. The National Conference of State Legislatures has more information, including the map below (NCSL has lots of great election law resources).

Twenty-four states have some form of Automatic Voter Registration (another NCSL link!) where eligible voters are registered when interacting with a government office — most frequently the Department of Motor Vehicles — unless they choose to opt out. This list again includes both liberal and conservative states.

Why might conservative states embrace automatic voter registration? Governments realize cost savings when database systems are integrated, such as drivers’ license and voter registration databases. Personal identifying information and other information such as addresses tend to be cleaner when they can be cross-checked, which means fewer election communications are sent from election offices to defunct addresses, contributing to greater election integrity. Also, those who need drivers’ licenses tend to be older than the general population, and more Republican. Those without drivers’ licenses still need to use paper voter registration forms.

It is here where we have a needlessly complicated voter registration system that invites fraud. Campaigns and political parties engage companies that hire temporary workers to run voter registration drives. When employees are paid by the number of forms they collect, abuse follows. These fraudulent voter registrations do not result in fraudulent votes since there are safeguards and identification requirements in place to prevent it (which do cost election officials’ time and resources). But it creates an unnecessary appearance of fraud in a nation vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

While same-day registration and automatic voter registration are good and worthy innovations, we really do not need them. Here is where I agree with Donald Trump — let’s have a national identity card like many other countries. In addition, let’s make that card count as voter registration like North Dakota already does. This is what the Baker-Carter commission recommended following their investigation of the 2000 Florida fiasco. If we can get Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter to agree on something, maybe its worth trying.

So, register if you must and check to make sure your registration is current. But do it knowing that you’re doing this busywork because someone doesn’t want you to vote.