It should be easy to register to vote
By
Robyn E. Blumner Read Spanish Version
From
The St. Petersburg Times
Much
of the griping during this year’s general election had to do with the
voter registration process. Republicans and Sen. John McCain
inveighed against voter fraud and accused the liberal-leaning ACORN
of "destroying the fabric of democracy" after the group
submitted a registration form for a Disney character. Democrats
charged "voter suppression" in states that required exact
agreement between voter registration forms and Social Security or
driver’s license data.
The
problems arose because our old system of state-by-state registration
rules — some of which appear designed for a mail system via pony
express — is outmoded and frankly retains vestiges of our racist
past. We need to follow the lead of at least 24 other countries and
adopt a system of automatic and permanent voter registration.
This
is what a country that wants to encourage every eligible voter to
vote would do. Now let’s see if we are that kind of country.
Current
problems with voter registration would largely disappear if the
states or federal government were responsible for registering every
citizen who qualified.
First,
there would no longer be a need for third-party voter registration
drives. And that would eliminate the issue of paid gatherers padding
their results by, say, signing up new voters out of the phone book or
out of a children’s cartoon.
Second,
the problem of redundant, phony and illegal alien registrations that
gum up the operations of elections officials would be sharply
curtailed.
And
when registrations emanate directly from government records, other
perennial problems go away, such as the "no match"
situation when a voter’s identification and registration are slightly
different, e.g., using "William" on one and "Bill"
on the other.
But
if the pragmatic arguments don’t sway, perhaps the moral ones will.
Holding on to the current voter registration system is like cleaving
to a relic of our disgraced history. The requirement of voter
registration began in the late 19th century as a way to tamp down the
votes of "undesirables." In the North that was immigrant
newcomers, and in the South it was freed slaves and their progeny.
Beyond
the standard literacy tests and poll taxes, Southern counties
invented a host of gordian techniques for suppressing
African-American registration, including requiring blacks to guess
how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.
Add
to our shame that voter registration is still being used as an
obstacle, especially for low-income and less educated voters — who
tend to move more frequently and must continually reregister.
Then
there is the length of time between registration and the election.
While eight states allow registration and voting on the same day, 21
states, including Florida, cut off registration on Oct. 6. We can
send money around the world in the blink of an eye, but it apparently
takes weeks of lead time for a voter to get into a database.
Ridiculous.
One
of the trickiest aspects of universal registration is how to compile
the records. A proposal by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University School of Law suggests that states use drivers’ license
databases coupled with income tax and other public records to
aggregate eligible voters.
It
may be complicated initially, but this can be done if there is the
political will. I recall that when my brother turned 18 years old in
1981 he received a letter from the Selective Service telling him to
register for a potential draft. And that was in the days of punch
card computing.
It
seems to me that if the federal government can track down all of the
country’s males who turn 18, it wouldn’t take much to add females for
the purpose of building an electoral database.
The
new Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democrat in the White
House make this move all the more feasible. Despite the large turnout
in the last election, there are still 64-million unregistered voters
in the country. Universal registration needs to be tried.
