Category Archives: voter registration

AP:

In a bitter fight, Colorado Democrats recently muscled through the Statehouse a massive elections reform bill that allows voters to register up until Election Day and still cast their ballots.

It’s the latest – and most substantial – development in a nationwide Democratic Party effort to strike back at two years of Republican success in passing measures to require identification at polling places and purge rolls of suspect voters.

Democratic-controlled states like California, Connecticut and Maryland also all have sought to make it easier to cast a ballot as late as possible. They recently passed versions of same-day voter registration measures, which traditionally help younger and poorer voters – the sort who lean Democratic.

Undaunted, the GOP is aggressively fighting the efforts.

TPM:

Republicans in the Ohio Legislature are pushing a plan that could cost the state’s public universities millions of dollars if they provide students with documents to help them register to vote. Backers of the bill describe it as intended to resolve discrepancies between residency requirements for tuition and voter registration, while Democrats and other opponents argue it is a blatant attempt at voter suppression in a crucial swing state.

“What the bill would do is penalize public universities for providing their students with the documents they need to vote,” Daniel Tokaji, a professor and election law expert at Ohio State University told TPM. “It’s a transparent effort at vote suppression — about the most blatant and shameful we’ve seen in this state, which is saying quite a lot.”

News from Indiana.

The latest in the Colorado voting wars.

The Denver Post reports.

Jonathan Brater blogs.

AP reports.  Follow @IvanJourno if you care about what’s happening with Colorado election law.

Des Moines Register: “Two civil rights groups have sued Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz to halt a new state rule allowing people to be removed from voter registration lists if their citizenship is questioned.

The Oregonian reports.

The Columbus Dispatch reports.

Press release: “MADISON, WI – Eliminating Election Day voter registration in Wisconsin would cost taxpayers between $13.1 million and $14.5 million, according to a staff report released today by the Government Accountability Board.”

Here.

One of the key recommendations I make in The Voting Wars to fix the problems with our election system is universal voter registration conducted by the federal government combined with a national voter id card.  The i.d. card would assign each potential voter a unique voter id number, which would stay with the voter her entire life as she moves across the U.S.  The id card would give voters the option of providing a thumb print, so that if a voter ever forgets or loses the card she can use a thumb print for voting.  States would still get to set qualifications for voting: determining, for example, whether a person who registers to vote in a state is really a resident, is entitled to vote under rules barring felon voting, etc.

I have no illusions that this plan is going to be adopted any time soon.  Indeed, I often joke that the plan is one that unites Democrats and Republicans….against the plan.  Republicans tend not to like the universal voter id aspect (which is why election reformers speak in terms of “modernization” of voter registration) and Democrats don’t like the i.d. portion.

But a key benefit of the dual system I propose is that it prevents a number of different types of fraud, including voter registration fraud (no more third party voter registration groups) and double voting between states.  National voter id also would prevent voter impersonation fraud (if this were a real problem—which it is not).  It would also prevent non-citizen voting, because the federal government would verify citizenship before putting someone onto the national voter registration rolls.

So imagine my surprise that a group of conservative Secretaries of State are getting together to attack the proposal for universal voter registration on grounds that it would promote fraud.

Let’s be clear. There are three reasons why Republican secretaries of state would really oppose this effort.

1. A turf war/federalism.  State and local officials believe they should have the right to run federal elections, even though the Constitution gives Congress the power to set national rules for federal elections.

2. Federal government incompetence. State and local officials may think they can do a better job running elections. The track record on the state and local level, as I detail in my book, leaves me doubting this claim.

3. Expansion of the electorate could benefit Democrats.  Whether it is true or not, there’s a belief that nonvoters tend to skew Democratic, and expanding the rolls to make it easier to vote could help Democrats.  It empowers people to vote who did not take the time to vote or who did not do things right to register. As a matter of both philosophy and partisanship, Republicans may well oppose expanding the electorate in this way.

Barry C. Burden, David T. Canon, Kenneth R. Mayer and Donald P. Moynihan have written this oped in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

The decision of the Supreme Court of Nevada in Busefink v. State issued Oct. 4, but I just discovered it today while looking on the website for something else.  The Court rejected a First Amendment challenge to Nevada’s law barring payment per voter registration card for voter registration efforts.

The opinion notes a split among the courts on the question whether laws barring payments per voter registration card are subject to a strict/heightened scrutiny or not, meaning this issue could potentially be raised in a cert. petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I discuss the Busefink case, and ACORN’s broken business model, in Chapter 2 of The Voting Wars.

Too much work for poll workers, Wisconsin’s governor claims. The more things change….

Houston Chronicle: ”State election officials repeatedly and mistakenly matched active long-time Texas voters to deceased strangers across the country – some of whom perished more than a decade ago – in an error-ridden effort to purge dead voters just weeks before the presidential election, according to a Houston Chronicle review of records.”