“With ‘Motor Voter’ bill, Oregon perpetuates voting wars (OPINION)”

Paul Gronke in the Oregonian:

With those figures, it sounds like automatic voter registration is a good thing; it creates a voter registration system that is easier for citizens, less expensive for the taxpayers and less prone to inaccuracy. Moreover, voter registration is not enshrined in our Constitution. As Harvard historian Alex Keyssar has shown, it was only implemented in the 19th century as a method to disenfranchise first poor and foreign-born, and later African American citizens.

So why, then, did every single Republican in the Oregon House and Senate oppose the bill, and all but one Democrat (Scappoose’s Sen. Betsy Johnson, who opposed it last time) support the bill? The answer is that election administration and reform — both here in Oregon and nationwide — have become one more front in the all-out legal and political melee that law professor Rick Hasen calls the “Voting Wars.”

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