Toward A Better Registration System

Imagine an election in which registration is automatic, voters cast their ballots online, and more than half the votes are in before Election Day.

It may seem like a pipe dream to Washington lawmakers preoccupied with economic and national security woes. But state and local election officials are already envisioning a radically different future for American elections.

"This is not your grandmother's election any more," Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning told some 200 state and local election officials, policymakers and election experts at a Washington conference dubbed "Voting in America: The Road Ahead." The two-day confab last week was sponsored by the Pew Center on the States and the JEHT Foundation.

The notion that voters cast ballots only on Election Day is "antiquated," declared Browning, who described how fully half of Florida's 8.4 million voters cast early or absentee ballots this year. "I could not imagine conducting an election without early voting," added Browning, who said trying to usher that many voters through Florida's 7,000 polling places on one day would have been asking for trouble.

How to expand and improve early voting was just one of several topics dominating the conference, which brought together top election officials from Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The No. 1 issue on many election officials' minds, not surprisingly, was voter registration, which generated huge controversy in the weeks leading up to the election.

Voter protection advocates are pushing hard for so-called universal, or automatic, voter registration as the centerpiece of any election reform that Congress takes up next year. Models on the table include using existing government lists, such as motor vehicle records; identifying voters through census-style enumeration; and automatically registering 17-year-old citizens before they reach voting age.

"It is feasible to have a permanent list at the federal level," Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada's former chief electoral officer, told conference participants. It costs Canada less than $8 million a year to maintain its list of 23 million eligible voters, said Kingsley, now president of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an international nonprofit that fosters democratic participation.

Of course, not all state and local election administrators are ready to embrace universal voter registration. But a surprising number of election officials at the conference expressed interest in expanding the government's role in registering, or at least tracking, voters. Thanks to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, virtually all states have established searchable statewide voter registration databases. Those databases make it easer for election officials to tap motor vehicle and postal records, for example, to track voters who move, election experts say.

An interim step that's receiving state attention is online voter registration, which many election officials see as an antidote to the registration problems that surfaced in the recent election. Though allegations of fraud by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, were widely perceived as exaggerated, election officials still complained that third-party registration drives left them swamped with duplicative and error-riddled forms. A wave of new registrants also contributed to the backlog.

The spike in new voters created a nightmare scenario for election officials in California, Secretary of State Debra Bowen told conference-goers. Bowen described a "sea of paper" that submerged election workers, who spent hours bogged down in clerical data entry and in "trying to remove duct tape and remove staples" from zealously sealed envelopes containing registration forms.

California's paper-based registration system "results in an enormous number of errors, some just because you're trying to decipher people's handwriting," Bowen said. A state law enacted in September will usher in online voter registration, she said, identifying registrants through their dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, and the numbers from either a California driver's license or identification card. The new system should be in place by 2010, Bowen said.

Washington state launched an online voter registration system in January as a result of legislation enacted last year. The state registered more than 250,000 new voters, thanks in part to the new online registration system, a spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed said. Arizona, the first state to implement online voter registration, registered more than 105,000 voters in September alone on its EZVoter system.

"There may be ways to both make the system more effective for voters and more efficient for those who pay for the system," said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a project of the Pew Center on the States, during a conference break.

Other leading conference topics included improving early voting procedures; managing long lines; improving the voting system for military and overseas voters; ballot design and voting machines; and online voting. The big question for election officials going forward will be whether such proposed fixes will ultimately fall to the federal government or to the states.

"There is increasing awareness that elections are a national endeavor, even though they are conducted locally," noted Chapin. "The discussion going forward will be whether a national approach will be a federal approach or a more standard approach."

Chapin added that state officials "have much more ability to really substantially innovate" than federal officials. If the recent Pew/JEHT conference is any indication, they're already thinking far outside the box.