Online voter registration for all: It’s time
State election officials have been talking a lot lately about cost cutting and modernization.
In February, citing financial concerns, the NC State Board of Elections quietly informed county election officials that they must soon start withholding voter registration forms from organizers of registration drives. (We’re not happy about this new policy.)
Read the letter!
You Can Vote and other pro-democracy groups sent a letter today to the NC State Board of Elections to protest its decision to withhold voter registration forms from organizers of registration drives.
“This policy change has the direct result of restricting and impeding the ability of private individuals and groups from conducting voter registration programs throughout the state.”
Meanwhile, at meetings of the Modernization of Election Data Systems Commission, NC State Auditor Dave Boliek, who created and chairs the commission and whose office oversees the State Board of Elections, has spoken passionately about the need for secure, reliable, efficient, accurate, web-based, mobile-friendly election systems.
While there seems to be plenty of money for this effort – the General Assembly has provided $15 million to fund the modernization – we know that a lot of demands will be put on those funds from a lot of different stakeholders.
For two of the most important groups of stakeholders – elections officials (both the cost-conscious and tech-forward ones) and voters (the most important group) – there’s an innovation out there that would provide mutual benefit: online voter registration for all North Carolinians.
Currently, only voters with an NC driver's license or DMV-issued state ID can register online. Everyone else – including new citizens, new residents, young voters without a license, and voters with disabilities that prevent them from getting a license – has to register on paper.
For voters who can’t visit a voter registration event organized by You Can Vote or other groups, registering on paper can be problematic. It can require money to pay for printing and postage, or access to transportation and time off work to visit a county elections office during business hours. In this day and age, those are totally unnecessary barriers to North Carolinians trying to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.
While the benefits to voters of universal online registration are obvious, there are also plenty of benefits to elections officials. As detailed in our letter to the State Board of Elections, those benefits include:
Better data integrity: No more errors resulting from unclear or illegible handwriting. Fewer duplicate entries since the system could check for an existing registration before creating a new one.
Reduced costs: Less staff time, printing, postage and materials used to collect correct information from voters. Less staff time used to manually input info from paper forms, which could be scanned into the system.
Of course, the primary beneficiaries of universal online registration would be NC voters – the 7.8 million who are registered, the 1 million who are eligible but unregistered, and the incalculable number who will register in years to come.
For all of them, registering to vote – the first step toward exercising the most fundamental right of citizens in a democracy – could be done in a few clicks from the comfort of home.
Online voter registration for all NC voters is what we deserve. As election officials look to save money and modernize systems, there’s no better time for us to get it.