The change fulfills a campaign promise for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), whose state is likely to be crucial to the 2024 presidential race. He promoted the new system Tuesday as a “common sense” step to make elections more secure and less costly for taxpayers.
“Look, this is common sense. You already provide proof of identity, residency, age and citizenship at the DMV — all the information you need to register to vote,” Shapiro said in a video posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Democratic incumbent Barack Obama won Pennsylvania in the presidential election in 2012, while Republican Donald Trump picked up the state in 2016. Joe Biden flipped Pennsylvania back to blue in 2020. In each case, the candidate who won Pennsylvania also won the election.
About 8.7 million of the more than 10.3 million Pennsylvanians who are eligible to vote are registered. Closing gaps like that is a goal of the advocacy group When We All Vote, whose interim executive director Laura Miller said integrating voter registration with processes in which residents already engage — like renewing a driver’s license — increases the number of people who sign up.
Automatic voter registration particularly benefits young people heading to college and anyone else who moves and otherwise might forget to update their voter registration, Miller said.
“Voter suppression is still something that is happening in states across the country,” she said, noting that people of color, people with disabilities and young people are particularly impacted. “So any way that we can improve access to the ballot box is a win.”
U.S. residents have been able to register to vote at their state’s motor vehicles department since the implementation of a 1993 federal law that requires states to offer that option. The difference in jurisdictions with automatic voter registration is that eligible residents don’t have to go out of their way to opt in.
Oregon became the first state to enact automatic voter registration in 2015, and nearly two dozen states have followed. States with automatic voter registration are largely led by Democratic governors. Republicans in some GOP-controlled state legislatures have sought to tighten voting laws by requiring proof of identification when voting by mail and strengthening investigations of alleged election-related wrongdoing.
Critics of automatic voter registration question whether a by-default process can adequately ensure that only people who are eligible can sign up to vote. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, speculated Tuesday that Pennsylvania’s law would meet that pitfall.
“I can promise you, there will be no citizenship verification,” he wrote on X.
Although automatic registration tends to substantially increase registration rates, newly registered people are less likely to cast ballots, according to a California-based study published in 2021. The researchers wrote that the effects of automatic registration increase the longer the policy is in place.
In 2019, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice found that automatic registration led to increases in registrants ranging from 9 percent to 94 percent in various states. The pattern held in states with different partisan makeups.
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