Automatic Voter Registration Report

In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). This landmark piece of federal legislation aimed to promote higher levels of political participation by requiring state department of motor vehicle (DMV) offices to integrate the voter registration process with the driver’s license application process. That is, whenever an individual visited the DMV to renew or apply for a driver’s license, that same information was to be used to register the individual to vote or update the individual’s existing voter records, unless the individual expressly chose to opt out. Early studies of the effects of the NVRA “motor voter” provision showed encouraging results. The initial motor voter reforms (implemented in nine states and the District of Columbia) boosted turnout by a little over 2 percentage points, and newly registered voters were found to be as likely to vote as other registered voters. In Colorado, one of the earliest adopters of motor voter procedures, turnout was 6.1 points higher than the national average after three years of the program.

However, 20 years after its passage, many states were not in full compliance with Section 5 of the NVRA, the section that outlines the motor voter provision. A 2014 report revealed that 18 million more Americans would be registered over a two-year period if the lowest-performing states moved up to the 75th percentile of NVRA compliance. Top-performing states integrated the driver’s license application with a voter registration application (without asking for duplicate information), electronically transferred data from the DMV to the elections office, automatically updated addresses on existing voter registration records, and offered assistance with the voter registration process, yet many other states fell short of these benchmarks. At this time, states began to be motivated to develop their own policies for achieving streamlined voter registration, on top of the NVRA. To date, 22 states and the District of Columbia have enacted automatic voter registration policies in some form.

Automatic voter registration (AVR) is defined as “a system that registers an individual to vote … if eligible, by electronically transferring the information necessary for registration from government agencies to election officials of the State so that, unless the individual affirmatively declines to be registered, the individual will be registered to vote in … elections.” AVR reforms set out to accomplish three main objectives. The primary goal of AVR is to boost voter turnout through reducing the burden associated with registering to vote in the first place. In AVR systems, most of the cost of registration is shifted from the potential voter to state officials. Although there is no guarantee that an individual will subsequently show up to the polls after being registered, increasing registration does have a positive (although smaller) impact on voter turnout. In the most recent and most comprehensive study of the registration and turnout effects of AVR, a differences-in-differences analysis estimated a 3 percent increase in registration and a 1.3 percent increase in turnout due to AVR. Since many states’ AVR policies are brand new, the effect is expected to grow over time.