In April 2023, the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 7050, a law imposing a slew of new regulations on the activities of third-party voter registration organizations (or “3PVROs” as they are referred to by Florida government officials). Under the law, these groups must re-register with the state before each election cycle in order to collect voter registration forms, and they have a shorter time frame to return voter registration forms to the county supervisor of elections; just 10 days, down from 14, with a $50 penalty per late day, up to $2,500 per application. SB 7050 also requires that applicants are provided with receipts that contain the name of the volunteer or staff member who registered them. 

The law also prohibits individuals previously convicted of felonies from “handling or collecting” voter registration applications, and imposes $50,000 fines for each volunteer violating these standards. This effectively requires 3PVROs to conduct background checks. The ceiling for aggregate fines has also increased: groups can now face up to $250,000 in fines each year, quintupling from the previous figure of $50,000.

The effects of SB 7050 have been felt around the state. In a state that already sees lower voter registration rates across the board, particularly for Black, Latinx, Asian, and other communities of color, outside organizations have long stepped in to fill a void left by state actors. But that work is now stalling. When the law came into effect, Poder Latinx, an organization promoting civic engagement in Latinx communities, paused their programs as there were “no clear guidelines on how to move forward.” Carolina Wassmer, Poder Latinx’s Florida State Director, mentioned that the organization had to work closely with their legal counsel to understand the law’s implications and ways to ensure compliance before resuming voter outreach.

Advocates see SB 7050 as the latest in a wave of voter suppression laws to come out of the state legislature. It was preceded by other laws such as SB 90 and SB 524 which restricted vote-by-mail and increased fines on these groups, respectively. 

“7050 was sort of the deathblow to third-party voter registration,” said Genesis Robinson, interim executive director of Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund, a Black-led voter rights organization. “It was really a compounding effect with other voter suppression bills that had passed in previous legislative sessions.”

The requirement of re-registering with the state each election cycle, combined with the possibility of burdensome fines, has “radically changed” how the League of Women Voters of Florida registers voters. “We come prepared with voter registration applications, but we just no longer take them away and turn them in,” Cecile Scoon, co-president of the Florida League, told Bolts. 

Rather than collecting forms and submitting on behalf of voters, League volunteers now provide people with assistance with filling out the form as well as stamps and envelopes that the organization has purchased through fundraising so that applicants can mail the forms on their own. However, this new method only works if individual applicants take the initiative to mail their own form—which is more difficult to guarantee than when 3PVROs collected and submitted on their behalf.

“The whole process of explaining to mail it and everything like that is slower,” Scoon said. Before, volunteers could walk through crowds at Fourth of July parades and community events, handing out and collecting voter registration forms, but now, they are “more stationary at a table.”

D’Bria Bradshaw, Florida state coordinator of the Campus Vote Project, which supports universities in getting students to register, has had to try other novel strategies to avoid any possibility of fines. “The best way to get students registered to vote: direct them to the QR code, direct them to the website, and walk them through registering to vote,” said Bradshaw.

By scanning QR codes, students can access voter registration forms on their electronic devices and fill it out on their own (hopefully right there on the spot) without outside assistance.

Other organizations have also shifted to a digital strategy. Equal Ground has invested in tablets and electronic devices to bring to community events, where organizers walk applicants through the process of registration. “Because of 7050 and the implications with respect to fines and fees and potential jail time, we thought it necessary to mitigate risk as much as possible. And so we have foregone doing paper voter registration applications,” said Robinson. “That has a tremendous impact on the communities that we serve.” Robinson points out that voters of color are five times more likely to be registered to vote by a third-party voter registration organizer.

Recognizing the suppressive nature of SB 7050, several groups challenged the law in federal court shortly after its passage. Abha Khanna of Elias Law Group is the lead attorney on the case Florida NAACP v. Byrd, which challenges three provisions of the law: the personal information retention ban, a previous section that originally prohibited noncitizens from handling voter registration applications as well as people with felony convictions, and the increased fines for late applications or technical errors. The former two provisions are not currently in effect; the first was preliminarily enjoined due to a lack of clarity on what constitutes personal information, while the second was found unconstitutional and permanently enjoined.

The third provision, however, remains in effect and is hampering the functioning of voter organizations. 

“A single late day can really have serious consequences for many of these non-profit organizations on shoestring budgets,” said Khanna. “The result of all of these [provisions] individually and together is to really try to squeeze out and crush third-party voter registration organizations and limit their opportunities and their abilities to register.”

The law has also left voting organizations struggling to find enough willing and able volunteers. When the noncitizen provision was in effect, organizations like Poder Latinx that serve immigrant communities faced shrinking teams as some volunteers were not citizens. Though that provision has been struck down, the provision forbidding volunteers who have previously been convicted of a felony still burdens these groups, as they must conduct background checks to avoid the possibility of facing steep fines, with the maximum penalties of $250,000 per year often exceeding organizations’ annual budgets.

Threats of fines and criminal penalties without clear guidelines on what is required has produced a climate of fear surrounding voter registration work. Robinson of Equal Ground mentioned that many of the organization’s long-time paid canvassers have “walked away from that space voluntarily because their risk is just too great.” And according to Scoon, some League volunteers—particularly older women—are apprehensive about continuing to register voters as they feel that handing out their full names on receipts could endanger their physical safety in a tense political environment.

SB 7050 has also made it more difficult to track how many voters they have registered. Prior to the law, voting organizations had special registration numbers that were added to the forms they collected so that government data would reflect how many voters were registered by each organization. Now that many groups have stopped collecting forms, there is no way to know if voters who received paper forms actually completed and submitted them.

Though procuring an exact number is impossible, Scoon estimated that voter registration numbers have gone down “at least 30 percent” for the League. Wassmer mentioned that Poder Latinx has achieved less than 50 percent of its goal to reach 10,000 voters since the law’s passage. Robinson also described a “deep decline” in the number of voters Equal Ground has been able to reach, as well as an overall decrease in the registration of Black voters across the state.

In 2020, the most recent presidential election year, voting organizations in Florida had registered 458,197 voters. In 2024, they have registered only 13,521 Floridians as of August 31.

This drop is raising alarms about inequalities in voter access. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have implemented automatic voter registration in recent years, and some states have explored other innovative ways to reach groups of voters who don’t have contact with typical registration channels such as a DMV. Michigan last year became the first place to automatically register people to vote as they leave prison. And Colorado is working with Native leaders to register voters through tribal enrollment rolls. Several states have tried to enact automatic voter registration through Medicaid, though the reform is being held up at the federal level. 

Where these efforts are still fledgling, outside groups are standing in the gap to reach more voters by promoting voter registration and reducing disparities in civic engagement. “The voters that they tend to reach, that the other services—government services—don’t usually reach, tend to be Black and brown and poor voters,” Khanna said. 

As of November 2022, Florida had the fifth lowest percentage of registered voters as a share of the eligible population. It has no automatic voter registration, nor any state-sponsored mechanisms to promote higher registration numbers, and increasing burdens and punitive measures on outside organizations that threaten to reduce overall voter registration and turnout and widen racial gaps ahead of the 2024 election.

Yet, voting advocates question the need for such extreme restrictions. “It’s not that there’s a rampant issue of these 3PVROs sitting on applications or behaving in a way that was un-diligent when it came to submitting voter registration applications,” Khanna said.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true for many organizations, such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, which had robust training programs requiring volunteers to pass a quiz before registering voters, and pairing newer volunteers with more experienced ones to ensure guidelines were being followed. 

“If they had problems, just deal with the people you have problems with. The League has never had a problem. The League has never been written out, warned, or anything,” Scoon said.

Teresa Cornacchione is the civic engagement coordinator at the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service, an organization that is certified to register students to vote. A major challenge emerged for the Bob Graham Center in 2021, when SB 90 was passed by the Florida legislature, requiring that such groups submit voter registration forms to the supervisor of elections in the county in which the applicant resides. The University of Florida is comprised of students from all across the state, so submitting forms to each of Florida’s 67 counties increased the time and cost associated with voter registration. SB 7050’s narrowing of the time frame to return forms, combined with this 2021 requirement, has made the voter registration process more difficult for staff and volunteers at UF.

Yet, despite these barriers, voting organizations have not given up hope. According to Cornacchione, staff and students at the University of Florida are ready “to work even harder” to register voters. “I don’t think the 3PVRO stuff has really deterred these students from being engaged,” she said. The Bob Graham Center’s Gators Vote initiative visits first-year classes and registers students to vote with the permission of the instructor.

In April, Equal Ground began a statewide tour to educate voters on new registration requirements, the implications of voter suppression laws, and issues that will be on the ballot. Similarly, the League is hosting forums, litigating, participating in bus tours, preparing voter guides, and tabling at colleges, churches, and community events. The organization is also mobilizing voters around abortion rights, which is on the 2024 ballot as Amendment 4.

“There’s a lot of mobilization that you can do that is not directly attached to voter registration,” Scoon said. 

The post Florida Law Strikes “Deathblow” to Outside Groups Trying to Register New Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

Cloud is now vice chair of the Southern Ute tribal council, and from the tribe’s headquarters early this summer, she reflected on how much has changed. Since 2019, when Democrats gained a legislative trifecta in the state, Colorado has established a polling place on the reservation and placed a drop box there for mail ballots. The state has also hired special liaisons to promote and facilitate turnout among Native voters. “I don’t want future generations to have to deal with any of what we’ve had to, to get to vote,” Cloud told me. “We should have access to the vote, to shape our own region, our own country.”

Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections. 

The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”

Cloud, like Griswold, sees immense promise in this plan. When she testified in favor of the law last year, she said Colorado “serves as a model for other states to increase voting among tribal members.” And advocates living in those other states are watching. Several told me Colorado’s reform could be transformative if it spreads nationwide: Roughly one third of the more than six million Native Americans who are eligible to vote across the country are not registered, a share far greater than that of white Americans who are unregistered.

And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.

“When tribes have given out too much information, that information has been exploited,” Cloud said, nodding to U.S. government and industry having used tribal data and maps to locate natural resources and justify land theft, among other harms. “We have to maintain trust and we have to protect tribal members and their information.”

It’s a worry that other tribal leaders and advocates for Native voting rights echoed in conversations this spring and summer. “We’ve had our lists, our populations, kept by the government before—and that hasn’t ended well for us,” Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, a member of the ​​Tohono O’odham Nation and the top elections official in Pima County, Arizona, told me.

Anticipating that data-sharing would generate concerns, Colorado legislators wrote the law to make the program optional: Tribes can opt in, only if and when they feel comfortable with it. Griswold says she is in no rush to implement this program until tribes want it.

Cloud and other representatives of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, along with leaders of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, their western neighbors, have held ongoing discussions with Griswold’s staff to share their concerns, and work out whether acceptable compromises can be found. They’ve met about 10 times over the last year, exploring what safeguards could be put in place. 

Those talks haven’t yet yielded any agreement, though the parties seem cautiously optimistic. The chair of the Ute Mountain Utes even says a breakthrough could come as soon as this year.

Cloud, too, hopes to reach an agreement, but she remains wary. The day we met at the Southern Ute headquarters happened to fall exactly 100 years to the week since Native Americans gained U.S. citizenship. That landmark, Cloud said, at once seems distant and shamefully fresh. “We are the first and original residents of this entire continent,” she told me, standing in a temporary exhibit the tribe set up to commemorate the 100-year anniversary. “The first ones here, and the last to have citizenship.”

We were speaking amid what was, as recently as 1868, a Ute territory of more than 56 million acres. It covered most of what is now the state of Colorado, plus large portions of what are now Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. 

Her tribe today controls less than one percent of that area, a sliver of reservation land near Durango, in southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border. Colorado was once home to more than 40 tribal nations, but just two recognized tribes—the Southern Utes, and the Ute Mountain Utes—are still based here. Cloud thinks constantly about how to protect the 1,500 people enrolled in her tribe, and what remains of their land. 

“When the Europeans came in, and our homelands were greatly reduced, you get a disconnection between humans and nature,” she said. “You get traumatic experiences, and trust issues that Native people have with the United States government.”

This tribe’s journey is a familiar one in the broader story of Native American betrayal: members killed or otherwise oppressed at the hands of white settlers; a United States government that encroached gradually, agreeing to and then violating treaties in order to steal land and resources; and eventually tribes shunted by the government onto the reservations they inhabit today.

In various ways, and with varying levels of success, Colorado’s state government has lately been trying, or at least saying it’s trying, to repair this harm. The legislature here has, in the last few years, passed a series of laws and resolutions intended to improve education, water rights, public safety, and more, for Native people living in this state.

Colorado’s new voter registration reform also came out of that repair work. Proponents see it as a valuable step toward making American democracy more inclusive of the land’s original inhabitants. “Historical voter suppression in Colorado has been against Native people and Native people living on tribal lands,” Griswold said. “Understanding that there is this historical backdrop, I’ve really tried to pursue any means to reverse that historical voter suppression and get eligible people registered.”

The state of Colorado already registers citizens to vote automatically, but only at the DMV, when they’re getting a driver’s license or state ID. The program has been wildly successful at signing up new voters, but voting rights advocates worry that it’s leaving behind people who do not go to the DMV and apply for an ID—including many who live on reservations. 

The new law expands this automatic approach to tribal enrollment lists. This reform would reach tribal members wherever they may reside, and most Native Americans do not live on reservations. Those who do stand to be most affected, experts said, because they are more likely to be unregistered. 

Cloud said she’s all-in on continuing to make voting easier for the tribe, and stressed that she appreciates Griswold’s efforts to build relationships with tribal leaders. But in conversation, she also laid out the difficulties in reconciling her different goals.

“How do we protect our sovereignty? How do we protect our tribal members?” Cloud asked. 

And how, she added, can tribal leaders embed those aims within the mechanics of voter registration?

As she pondered these questions, Cloud received an alert on her phone and paused our interview. A Southern Ute member had been reported missing—a 15-year-old girl, the alert stated, last seen a couple of days prior outside the reservation. 

Cloud wondered if the girl might already be in New Mexico, or even farther from home. She listed her worries aloud: “Has anybody reached out to her family?”

“What has been done to try to contact her?” 

“Have they contacted the neighboring counties, the neighboring states?” 

“Do they have the right description of her?” 

Whenever this happens, and it happens shockingly often—the girl is the third person to go missing from the reservation in a month, amid a national crisis of missing and murdered girls and women that disproportionately plagues indigenous communities—Cloud thinks of her friend Nicole, who vanished from the area two years ago. For days, Cloud told me, authorities assured Nicole’s loved ones that she’d turn up quickly. “Come to find out,” Cloud said, “she’d been murdered in the first day.”

Cloud resumed our interview. With her mind still on the missing girl, she brought the conversation back to registration policies.

“This actually ties in with the voting: It’s the safety of our members,” she said. 

“Knowing our tribal information is out there, we become very vulnerable,” she continued. “People don’t place value on tribal lives. This is very real.”

Three other states besides Colorado—Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico—have also adopted laws lately to automatically register Native American tribal members to vote; their reforms, too, have yet to be implemented. Like Colorado, these other states give tribes the option to enter into the program but don’t force it upon them. To date, no tribe in any of these states has agreed to do so.

But at least one tribe may be close to such an agreement: the Ute Mountain Utes, whose reservation is bigger than that of the Southern Utes in both land area and enrolled population, could move on this matter soon by entering into an agreement with Colorado’s government, says their chairman, Manuel Heart. 

Sitting in his office on the reservation, Heart echoed some of Cloud’s concerns about how sharing tribal enrollment lists could infringe on tribal privacy and sovereignty. But, after much discussion with the state, he said, he feels ready to get started. He hopes to bring the issue to a vote of the tribe’s elected council soon.  

Our interview took place in early June, still weeks away from the state’s June 25 primary. His mail ballot was sitting on his desk as we talked; he’d already filled it out and was keen to cast it as soon as possible. 

Heart said his tribe, like the Southern Utes, has benefitted from other, recent reforms meant to facilitate Native voter participation: the Ute Mountain Utes now have a drop box on their reservation, plus an in-person polling center for anyone who’d rather vote that way.

The officials who run elections in this area are proud of these voter services, but acknowledge that turnout remains very low on Ute Mountain Ute land.

Danielle Wells, the elections supervisor in Montezuma County, showed me a map of the area and pointed to where her staff places drop boxes, in all the county’s major towns. In the runup to elections, five of the six boxes yield hundreds of ballots each time elections workers swing by to collect from them, she said. In the drop box on the reservation, though, “we see maybe 20, maybe a dozen,” Wells told me.

The June 25 primary would go on to draw especially low participation: Only 3 percent of registered voters living on Ute Mountain Ute land cast a ballot, according to the clerk’s office, a rate nine times lower than that of Montezuma County voters overall.

The gap isn’t usually that wide, but it’s always there. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 50 percent, trailing Montezuma County’s overall turnout of 85 percent. In 2022, when Colorado was electing a governor and other major officeholders, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 22 percent—three times lower than the county’s overall rate. A large turnout gap also persists on Southern Ute land, and studies show that this holds true for Native Americans across the country. 

Heart badly wants to increase turnout, but doesn’t fault his tribe’s membership for so often declining to vote. Would you be excited, he asked, to participate in elections that shape a political system so historically hostile to your community, to elect representatives of a government that has stolen from and broken promises to tribes? 

“How is a tribal member going to feel when they’ve always been pushed away?” Heart said. “It wasn’t our choice to be put on these reservations. The United States government put us here.”

To this day, in many other states, tribes are still constantly trying to beat back new restrictions—strict voter ID requirements that don’t accommodate tribal ID cards, gerrymandered maps that dilute their representation, inconvenient polling places, and other policies that make it particularly hard for Native Americans, and especially those living on reservations, to have a say in U.S. democracy. 

Expansive reforms like automatic voter registration for tribal members remain a political non-starter in many states with large Native populations. “Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska would not do that,” Ahtza Dawn Chavez, who runs a non-profit in New Mexico that promotes Native voter participation, told me, naming four states currently under full Republican control. “You have to lay down a solid foundation, and [automatic voter registration] is something that is maybe stage two or three or four of that work. In a lot of states, you’re still at stage one.” 

In Arizona, for example, voting rights advocates have spent years fighting restrictions, proposed by Republicans, that could make voting harder for Native people. Arizonans in 2022 narrowly rejected a ballot measure that would have made voter ID laws more stringent; Native voters would have suffered the brunt of those proposed rules.

Cázares-Kelly, the elections official in Pima County, bemoans the many hurdles that already suppress the Native vote in her state of Arizona. Notably, she told me, it can be challenging for Native folks who live on reservations to register to vote because homes there often don’t have addresses in the format typical of non-reservation lands—that is, number, street name, city, state, zip code.

“The home where I grew up, I cannot give you the address for it,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I can tell you where it is: south off of Highway 86 onto Indian Route 15, you turn right at the red fence, drive down the dirt road. There’s a fork in the road and you take a left. Our house is the first one by the big tree. That’s literally my address.”

Since getting elected in 2021, she has found that even well-meaning officials commonly have little understanding of why voter engagement campaigns and election policies that work for most of the population may not work for people who live on reservations.

In Colorado, both the Ute Mountain Utes and the Southern Utes report that voter turnout is often substantially higher for their internal elections, which are administered entirely by the tribes. Neither syncs their tribal elections with Colorado’s; the Ute Mountain Utes vote on a Friday in October and the Southern Utes vote on a Friday in November. 

On the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, Chairman Heart said, few talk much, if at all, about U.S. and Colorado elections. The land is so far removed from Colorado’s population center—it’s a roughly seven-hour drive to Denver, and is in fact much closer to Albuquerque—that for decades both the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes were placed in New Mexico media markets, meaning they’d receive broadcast political advertising meant for that state and not theirs.

Only in the last decade or so have political candidates started regularly visiting the area. “They hardly ever came,” Heart said. “And once they got elected, they never came.” 

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the first and still only person of Native American descent to represent Colorado in Congress, and one of only four Native people ever elected to the U.S. Senate, feels this acutely, because for four decades he has lived on a ranch on the Southern Ute Reservation.

He is 91 now, and from an armchair in his home, he, too, said U.S. government officials have broadly and consistently failed Native people on policy concerning elections and voting.

“It’s pretty difficult to ask a people who you’ve dominated, whose wealth you’ve taken over the years, to suddenly help support you getting elected. That’s a long jump,” he told me. “Unless you can show somebody how voting is going to help them, they’ll have a lower interest in it.” 

Nighthorse Campbell is bullish on automatic voter registration but understands why tribes may not trust elections officials with their membership data. “It’s not going to take a week or two. It takes years, and years, and years. And maybe it’ll never be universal,” he said.

The ongoing negotiations between the Ute tribes and the state of Colorado over automatic voter registration affect only a tiny fraction of the country’s nearly 600 federally recognized tribes. These two tribes combined have enrollments of under 4,000 people; a successful implementation of the pending reform in Colorado may only lead to a few hundred new registrations at first, and many fewer each subsequent year.

But Allison Neswood, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund and an expert on issues of Native voting rights, says there are many eyes on these negotiations around the country. The outcome of the state’s talks with the two tribes could set a landmark precedent stretching much beyond Colorado, she told me, if the parties can identify solutions that satisfy all their goals.

“Once one tribe, two tribes, three tribes start to get the ball moving on this, and show that there’s a way to do this in a way that’s respectful of and promoting of tribal sovereignty, and that’s protective of data sovereignty, I think more tribes will feel more comfortable diving in and looking for their own approach,” Neswood said.

Voter registration laws created a hurdle to voting when they emerged in the U.S. starting in the 1870s, forcing people to declare an intent to vote before they could cast a ballot. These laws, then and often still today, have depressed turnout among people with fewer resources and less familiarity with the political process. To alleviate this burden, Oregon in 2015 became the first U.S. state to adopt automatic voter registration; the policy has since spread to about half of all states. It’s typically implemented at DMVs, for a couple of simple reasons: One, the vast majority of the population visits these offices on a somewhat regular basis, and, two, the offices already collect all the information necessary to determine voter eligibility. But some states are trying to expand it to other government settings to reach even more people—especially lower-income residents less likely to visit the DMV.

Several states, including Colorado, want to try this out at Medicaid offices, and, last year, Michigan became the first state to approve automatically registering people as they leave prison. 

Extending this program to tribal enrollment lists comes from the same desire to make sure fewer people fall through the DMV’s cracks.

Colorado’s reform passed as part of a broader bill to facilitate voting in the state, for instance by expanding ballot access on college campuses. That bill was sponsored by Democrats, and passed with their unanimous support, while most Republicans were in opposition. New Mexico’s reform also passed last year with largely Democratic support, and was also part of a large bill meant to ease voter access. Nevada (in 2021) and Michigan (in 2023) both included tribal enrollment lists in laws meant to expand automatic registration generally.

But unlike efforts to implement automatic voter registration in other settings, the process that’s ongoing in Colorado, Cloud says, requires deep reflection. It invites the state to confront its history of violence and prove to the tribes that the government can be trusted. 

Barbara McLachlan, the state representative for southwest Colorado, whose district includes reservation land of both of Colorado’s Ute tribes, says she understands this caution. “We’re trying to turn a cruise ship,” she told me over coffee in downtown Durango. “It takes time, little by little. There is a generational lack of trust; they’ve been treated horribly, and still are, in some ways.”

When she entered office, eight years ago, she did not know how to even broach the subject of collaboration with Native residents she represented. She said it took years, and regular outreach, to build credibility with the tribes. Both Heart and Cloud say they appreciate her work, and name her as one of few people in state government with any consistent presence on their lands.

Prompted by a bill McLachlan sponsored, state government since 2023 has invited Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute leaders to deliver annual addresses to a joint session of the legislature—a platform these leaders have so far used to highlight lingering injustice and inequity in matters of water access, health care, and more. But McLachlan, who is term-limited and exiting office in January, laments that her colleagues in state government mostly still fail to do the sort of relationship-building that might have made it easier to jumpstart automatic voter registration by now. After eight years in the legislature, she told me, she only knows of one state House lawmaker, besides those already based in the region, who has visited either reservation.

“It’s hard, then, to say, ‘trust me on this one,’” she said, of the voter registration proposal.

To reach that trust now, Cloud and Heart both want concrete assurances that state elections officials can provide enough data protections for their membership lists.

Tribal and state leaders each said they’re still unsure of which policy mechanics might emerge from their negotiation. Tiffany Lee, the La Plata County clerk, who oversees U.S. elections on most Southern Ute land, has not been involved with that negotiation, but, in an interview at her Durango office, she floated a possible solution: The state could seal the personal information of anyone who is registered to vote off a tribal enrollment list. (This is also a solution proposed by Neswood in a policy paper she authored recently.) Colorado, like other states, already offers this option for anyone who wants their information to be confidential. That route is popular with public figures, judges, cops, and others who want an extra layer of protection.

The catch, Lee warned, is that sealing people’s records may make it harder for them to then update their voter registration down the line. If they move, or want to switch party affiliation, they’d have to pursue those steps in person at the clerk’s office, she said. “If we make them all confidential, that stops them from being able to do anything electronically with us, or by phone call,” Lee told me. “So, there are drawbacks.”

Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, is midway through her second and final term in this role. She said she hopes that these policy discussions are resolved in her time, but accepts that they may not be. “The people we’re talking to—them, or their parents, may have been excluded from the franchise in their lifetime. Sometimes things just take time,” she added.

At the Southern Ute headquarters, Cloud and I ambled through the exhibit that commemorated the tribe’s history and the 100-year citizenship anniversary. It contained photos of tribal members long deceased, and posters about the tribe’s relationships with water, land, and one another.

We were nearing the end of our time together, and the missing girl had thankfully just been safely located. 

Cloud pointed to photos of her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her grandfather, her aunt, and other relatives. “Can you imagine what they had to give up?” she said. “You live in two different worlds as Ute people: You’re still very much wanting to be connected to your past and your nature, your language, your culture, your tradition—but you also have to be very aware of what’s going on in your community on the other side, the assimilation side.”

She reached the final piece of the gallery, a poster in the shape of a frame with nothing in the middle. Cloud said it represents the unknown things, exciting and daunting alike, yet to come for the tribe. She said she hopes automatic voter registration will be among them. “This is the future, and anything is possible from now,” she said, looking at the frame. 

“We’ll get there with Jena, with the voting,” she added. “We’ll get there.”

The post On Native Land, a New Push to Expand Voting Meets the Long Tail of State Violence appeared first on Bolts.

The timing of both elections are major surprises. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called them in late May, while French President Emmanuel Macron shocked his country on June 9 by announcing that he was dissolving the National Assembly and organizing elections within a month.

Each election will decide who governs the country, using rules that often differ from U.S. norms. The modes of government vary, of course, but so do policies, gerrymandering, voter registration, voting in or after prison, voter ID, tabulations, and much more. 

At Bolts, we’re always interested in varying models of democracy, and what lessons they teach us. And we suspected that our readers have many questions as well. 

As part of our ongoing “Ask Bolts” series, we asked you to let us know what you’re thinking—and you delivered. We narrowed down your questions (with great difficulty) and had fun answering them below.  

We’ve organized your questions under five themes—explore at your leisure:

Why is this happening right now?

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

So, how do you vote?

How are districts drawn?

Who can vote?

Read on to learn how people vote in France and the U.K., why snap elections are a thing, what constraints exist on gerrymandering, and much more. 

Why is this happening right now?

Why are they allowed to decide when to hold elections? That seems kind of undemocratic to me, to call an election whenever the political tide favors them. What sort of balance is there in the system to prevent one party from running up the numbers for decades? — @aurorasintexas, on X

Snap elections are indeed unusual by U.S. standards: Current U.S. law dictates that federal elections be held in early November every two years—rain or shine. State governments tend to have similarly rigid calendars. 

In France, by contrast, the president has unchecked power to dissolve the National Assembly and order parliamentary elections; the only constraint is that it can’t be done again for a year. But this move is always a personal gamble: When presidents lose parliamentary elections, they appoint a prime minister from within the coalition that controls the Assembly; in such a configuration, presidents are largely reduced to a figurehead when it comes to domestic affairs. That’s what happened in 1997, the last time a president called snap elections: Conservative President Jacques Chirac thought his camp would emerge victorious, but there was instead an upset by the left. 

And now it’s happening to Macron, who called elections three years before they were scheduled. His party held a plurality in the outgoing Assembly but now appears on track to lose at least half of its seats later this week. 

In the U.K., snap elections are even more routine. It’s always the prime minister’s prerogative to decide when exactly to schedule the next national elections, though they must be within five years of the last ones. Unlike in France, there isn’t even a default date for the next election.

This system has faced plenty of criticism that it gives the ruling party an unfair advantage, and the U.K. actually experimented with reform in recent years: A 2011 law significantly constrained the PM’s prerogative, setting a default term of five years and requiring that the House of Commons approve earlier elections. “For the first time in our history the timing of general elections will not be a plaything of governments,” said one of the reform’s champions at the time. But subsequent PMs still managed to convince Parliament to schedule unexpected snap elections to take advantage of favorable polling, and the reform was repealed in 2022. 

But let’s return to the U.S.: Manipulating the timing of elections isn’t exactly rare here either.

State and local officials sometimes schedule ballot measures on dates they think will be most favorable to their goals. In 2018, for instance, Missouri Republicans controversially rescheduled a labor initiative from the November general election to the lower-turnout summer primary, expecting that this would yield better outcomes for them; last year, the Oklahoma governor scheduled a popular initiative to legalize marijuana on a standalone winter date, a choice denounced by state groups as a maneuver to depress turnout. 

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

Can you explain the runoff process in France? How is it determined which candidates make the runoff, e.g. how can three candidates qualify? — B., from New York | I see that France and the U.K. both elect representatives by district. Does that look the same as in the U.S.? — Anonymous

Just like in the U.S., France and the U.K. are carved up into districts, and each district elects one member of Parliament. (That’s what’s happening this week.) Unlike in the U.S., neither country has intraparty primaries; party leaders designate their nominees, rather than leave that decision to a popular vote. 

Otherwise, the rules of U.K. elections should be familiar to Americans: Each district holds a first-past-the-post election to select its MP, much like what’ll happen in the U.S. in November. In each district, the candidate with the most votes wins the seat, whatever their share of the vote. 

France holds its parliamentary elections over two rounds, though. In the first round, voters get to choose between all candidates who filed to run. If a candidate tops 50 percent, they win outright. Otherwise, a runoff is held a week later, and whomever gets the most votes in the runoff wins.

But who exactly makes these runoffs? Here’s where things get tricky: Runoffs in France’s parliamentary elections can have more than two candidates. 

The top two candidates always advance, plus any candidate who gets the support of more than 12.5 percent of the district’s registered voters. When turnout is low, it’s a lot harder to cross that threshold; candidates need a prohibitively high share of the actual votes cast. But when turnout is high, as it is this year, third-placed candidates routinely make it through. 

In France’s 2022 elections, turnout was just 48 percent; as a result, just eight out of 577 districts saw three-way runoffs. But turnout last Sunday surged to 67 percent. As a result, 311 districts saw three candidates advance; a handful of districts even had four candidates make the runoffs.

This set up a mad scramble. There are many French districts in which the far-right party, the Rassemblement National, likely cannot top 50 percent of the vote in two-candidate runoffs; but it has a much stronger shot in three-way battles where it only needs a plurality. In an effort to block the far-right and not split the vote, over 200 candidates dropped out in the days after the first round; as of publication, only 91 districts are still set for a runoff of more than two candidates.

Do these countries end up electing leaders who are more representative? — Bolts Lovers, in Virginia | Does the two round system work to improve representation? Why does France use it instead of instant runoffs/the single transferable vote? — Sefine 

In fact, France came close to having a system that looks a lot more like the U.K.’s: One of the main drafters of the 1958 constitution admired the British first-past-the-post system, but was overruled by President Charles de Gaulle, who saw the runoff system as likelier to produce stable majorities, according to Georges Bergougnous, a professor at the Sorbonne University. 

Neither the French nor British system is ultimately conducive to a parliamentary landscape where smaller political forces are well represented. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post system creates the same sort of pressure for voters to opt for the dominant parties as in U.S. general elections. In France, with each district electing one member and a two-round system that usually requires candidates to get a majority, it boxes out many parties unless they ally with larger forces.

Both countries have seen insistent calls by smaller parties and some election reformers to select at least part of Parliament through a method of proportional representation, but these proposals have not come through. (France briefly switched to a proportional system from 1986 to 1988.) 

Both countries’ parliaments also skew male and white, and people with immigrant backgrounds are underrepresented. 

France does have a law requiring that parties nominate an equal number of men and women, or else face fines. Since the law was adopted by the left in 2000, the share of women in the National Assembly has soared from 11 percent to 37 percent in 2022, but some parties don’t respect the requirement. (France imposes stricter gender parity in other elections.) In the U.K, which has no such requirement, women make up a third of the outgoing House of Commons. Women in the U.S. won 29 percent of House seats in 2022, which was a record-high for the country. 

So, how do you vote?

A family friend from France was visiting and told us that, instead of absentee ballots, you deputize another person who fills out a ballot for you on Election Day. How many people do that? — @rvarco, on X

Neither France nor the U.K. has any in-person early voting. Polls are open on Election Day. In France, that’s always on a Sunday; in the U.K., it’s always been on a Thursday since the 1930s. 

So what do you do if you can’t make it to the polls on that one day? As the question indicates, France has no mail-in voting. The U.K. does, though: Voters there can cast postal ballots.

Plus, both France and the U.K. have a system of proxy voting: People can deputize their right to vote to someone else by filing an application, which in both countries can be done online. On Election Day, this person then has the ability to go to your polling place and cast a ballot in your name—in addition to the ballot they’ll cast in their own name. There’s no way to control what the person you deputized does: You’ll have to find someone you trust will respect your wishes.

To your final question, the number of people who deputized their right to vote surged in France, in part due to the fact that Macron timed these snap elections for the early summer. More than 2 million voters signed up for proxy voting, which is more than double the 2022 elections.

I believe that, as reported, voter fraud was not a problem that needed solving in the U.K.. But why was voter fraud not more common before voter ID was required? — Paula 

The U.K.’s Conservative government recently adopted new requirements for people to show photo ID to vote. It was implemented for the first time in local elections last year, and will be used again in the national elections this week. We posed your question to Jessica Garland, director of research and policy at the U.K.-based Electoral Reform Society and a critic of this new requirement.

This is a “solution looking for a problem,” she answered. “Prior to the introduction of voter ID there were very low levels of recorded personation fraud in Britain,” she said, pointing to the country’s 2019 national and local elections: “Out of all alleged cases of electoral fraud that year, only 33 related to personation fraud at the polling station—this comprises 0.000057% of the over 58 million votes cast in all the elections that took place that year.” 

Compare those tiny numbers to the disruptions caused by the new law: Thousands of British people were turned away from the polls in 2023 due to the requirement, and thousands more did not attempt to vote as a result, according to the nation’s Electoral Commission. 

Said Garland, “Since its introduction, voter ID has prevented thousands more people from voting than have ever been accused of personation fraud.” This is a familiar phenomenon in the United States. Under the guise of cracking down on fraud, which is tremendously rare, conservative laws have deterred large numbers of eligible Americans from voting.

Do [France and the U.K.] have voter registration? Can you register between the 1st and 2nd rounds in France? — @m_schettig, on X

In both countries, it’s up to residents to proactively register to vote and update their registration as they move (either online, or at a government agency). And they must register weeks before election day. In France this year, because Macron organized snap elections within three weeks—an exceptionally rapid campaign—the deadline came within a day of his announcement, leaving people virtually no time to check their status and get on voter rolls amid widespread confusion.  

Reformers warn that millions of people are falling through the cracks of this system in both the U.K. and France. Many aren’t registered to vote or are registered at the wrong address. 

“This process for registration is proving to be an obstacle to universal suffrage,” Garland told Bolts about the U.K., where she works. “The groups most likely to be missing from the electoral registers are those who rent their homes (only 65 percent of private renters are registered compared to 95 percent of those who own their homes) and young people.” 

Garland wants the U.K. to adopt automatic voter registration, a model that exists in other European countries and many U.S. states. (French people are automatically registered at age 18, provided they abided by the mandatory census at age 16; but there is no update after they inevitably move.)

The idea is for public agencies to use information they already have to proactively register people to vote; this increases the registration rates among groups that are less likely to be engaged in the electoral process. (In the U.S., many states automatically register people through the DMV; some states are trying to register people when they interact with Medicaid services or when they are released from prison.)

The Labour Party has said it’ll introduce automatic voter registration in the U.K. if it wins Thursday’s elections. 

How are districts drawn?

In the U.K. and France, what is the (re)districting process like? Is there a scheduled amount of time until new boundaries are drawn? How does it compare to the U.S., where redistricting is plagued with gerrymandering, protection of incumbents, and litigation? — Tommy, in Pennsylvania

Let’s tackle them one by one. In the U.K., these districts are drawn by so-called boundary commissions. There’s a separate commission for each of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Since a reform adopted in 2020, boundaries are meant to be reviewed every eight years.

These bodies are mostly independent. “The scope for electoral gerrymandering, U.S.-style, is vanishingly small,” The Guardian quipped in 2023, the last time the map was redrawn. Garland agrees: “Changes must include public consultation and be agreed by parliament, and boundary decisions must be made according to principles that are set out in law,” she told Bolts. “This process and the commissions are generally viewed as non-partisan, and the commissioners are not under direct ministerial control.”

France mostly ignores redistricting. The country last redrew its boundaries in 2010; despite extensive demographic change, the rounds of redistricting before that were in 1986 and 1958.

It’s effectively up to the ruling Cabinet to decide if the time has come. At that point, the process is led by the Minister of the Interior in consultation with local leaders and political parties.

On paper, this could be a recipe for gerrymandering gone wild since the entire nation’s map is overseen by one partisan actor. But that doesn’t tend to be the case, according to Thomas Ehrhard, a professor of political science at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas who has written a book on redistricting in France. He told Bolts that redistricting in the past has produced maps that were meant to protect incumbents, but that they were not distorted by partisanship. 

One reason for this is that districts must respect other administrative boundaries; this “prevents monstrous forms of gerrymandering,” Ehrhard said. For instance, districts can’t overlap between different départments (the rough equivalent of a U.S. county), many of which are quite small; this greatly constrains what can be done with them. Districts “have fairly homogeneous territorial cohesion that respects the socio-economic realities of small geographical areas,” Ehrhard says. 

Each of the last two rounds of redistricting was overseen by the ruling conservative party, Ehrhard points out. Each time, the center-left won the first elections held under the new maps. 

How does the malapportionment of representatives compare between the U.S., the U.K. and France? — @USHouseEquality, on X

The fact that France redistricts so rarely means that it addresses demographic shifts very slowly, and population disparities between districts can snowball. 

And even when the country adopts a new map, districts may already be drawn with uneven sizes. Each district can deviate by up to 20 percent from its county’s average district population. That’s a large allowance compared to the U.S., where all districts within a state must be as equal as possible. 

Right before the 2010 redistricting, there was a 7 to 1 disparity between the populations of the smallest and largest district in mainland France. (Districts in some of France’s overseas regions tend to be smaller.) As of 2022, the disparity was 3 to 1, according to an analysis by Le Monde that shows large variance across the country. 

On paper, the U.K. is much stricter: The country only allows for a variation of 5 percent.

But there’s another major source of disparity there: The size of districts is assessed based only on the number of people who are registered to vote, not based on an area’s total population. This dilutes representation for areas that have a greater number of residents who are ineligible to vote, or who simply are less likely to be on voter rolls. 

“Practically, it means the [Members of Parliament] representing young and diverse inner-city seats have to serve much larger populations of constituents than MPs representing older, rural seats with high registration rates,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, told The Guardian. An analysis released last year by pollster Peter Kellener confirmed that this significantly distorts the political map; districts held by Labour are on average more populous than districts held by the Tories. 

Who can vote?

Can voting rights be removed from citizens in France and the U.K., such as if they receive a felony conviction? — Madison, from New York

France mostly does not strip people of the right to vote when they’re convicted of a crime—including while they’re incarcerated.

It largely enables people to vote even from prison, as Cole Stangler reported in Bolts during the country’s 2022 presidential election. “Today, only a small minority of the country’s prisoners are stripped of their voting rights—political officials who have misused their power and convicted terrorists,” Stangler wrote at the time. This is a far cry from the U.S., where only Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on people voting from prison.

France has also taken proactive steps in recent years to help incarcerated people actually exercise this right. Turnout among people from prison surged nearly 13-fold between 2017 and 2022.

The U.K. disenfranchises people convicted of a crime while they’re in prison. The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly said that this ban violates human rights, rulings that triggered some debate in the country but ultimately led to only minor changes. 

But the U.K. allows its citizens to vote when they’re released from prison.

That, too, is a far cry from vast swaths of the United States; in roughly half of the states, people with felony convictions are barred from voting long after they’ve been released; sometimes they have to pay hefty fees to regain their voting rights. Neither France nor the U.K. does anything resembling the practice of some U.S. states like Mississippi and Virginia, which strip people of their right to vote for life over most or all felony convictions. 

I’m a British citizen living abroad. I still can vote and I have applied for a postal vote in the last constituency in which I lived in the U.K.. Do French citizens living outside of France have voting rights, and if so, where do their votes get counted? — Ray 

The two countries approach representation for citizens who live overseas very differently. 

U.K. citizens vote in the district where they used to live. (This means that they cannot vote in parliamentary elections if they’ve never lived in the country in the past.) In practice, this means they have to cast a mail ballot or deputize a proxy to vote for them. 

France, by contrast, has seats just for its citizens who live outside of France: The entire globe is carved up into 11 districts, and each of these districts elects an Assemblymember through the same exact procedure as any other seat. (There are calls in the U.K. to set up similar districts.) French citizens who live abroad can vote at polling centers set up by their consulate on election day, or they can vote online—an option that does not exist in mainland France. 

For instance, all of the United States makes up one French district alongside Canada. In the district’s first round this past Sunday, a candidate from Macron’s party and a candidate from the Left coalition advanced to a runoff.

The post How Voting Works in the U.K. and France: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

Nobody told Percy Glover he could vote when he was released from prison nineteen years ago. Michigan allows anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote, meaning Glover could have immediately registered, but he spent years unaware of his rights.

“I was struggling financially. I couldn’t find a job. I was lost in everything,” he told Bolts. “It was years later before I actually considered even thinking about voting.”

Glover eventually learned his rights and started working to engage others in democracy. Last year, he founded F.A.I.R Voting Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for more inclusive election procedures in Michigan, and this month he is celebrating a major legislative victory: The state is about to make it a lot easier for people who exit prison to end up on voter rolls. 

State lawmakers last week adopted House Bill 4983, which would put Michigan in a unique class. If signed by the governor, this would be the first law in the nation to require a state to register people to vote when they’re released from prison.

The state would later send people mail notifying them that they have been registered to vote, as well as giving them the option to decline and opt out of voter rolls. 

Michigan first adopted automatic voter registration in 2018 as part of Proposal 3, a ballot measure that voters overwhelmingly approved. The idea is for public agencies to leverage their existing interactions with citizens to register them to vote, relieving individuals of that burden and shifting it to the state. But, like in most of the other states that have set up this program, Michigan has only implemented it to add people to voter rolls when they get, renew, or update their driver’s licenses or state IDs.

HB 4983 would significantly expand automatic voter registration by ordering the Department of Corrections to implement it as well; at least 8,000 people are released from state prison each year in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s office. The bill would also bring other agencies into the program, building on steps that a few states have already taken to register people when they obtain a Native American tribal ID, or when they sign up for Medicaid. 

“We wanted to include more than just driver’s licenses so that we could really get people registered any time they’re interacting with our government, which includes Medicaid offices and the Department of Corrections,” state Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, the Democrat who sponsored the legislation, told Bolts. 

Tsernoglou was first elected in 2022 as part of a blue surge that delivered full control of Michigan’s state government to the Democratic Party for the first time since the 1980s. Democrats have passed a number of major voting bills this year, and HB 4983 itself is part of a broad voting-rights package that now awaits the signature of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has supported other efforts to expand ballot access. 

Voting rights advocates in Michigan say they’re confident she will sign these new reforms; her office would not specify her plans when asked by Bolts. 

These advocates wanted to build on the 2018 ballot initiative to expand its reach. “Prop 3 was a huge step in the right direction, but there were a lot of people not interacting [with a driver’s license office] so conversations since then really centered around how to reach people where they’re at,” said Ben Gardner, Michigan campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, a national organization. This bill also authorizes Michigan to still identify other public agencies in the future that could also automatically register people to vote.

Michigan is already better than most states at registering people to vote, but there are still hundreds of thousands of eligible Michiganders who aren’t registered—and that population includes disproportionate numbers of low-income people and people of color, voting rights advocates say. They’re confident that, if Whitmer signs the bill to strengthen automatic voter registration, it can expect to reach and sign up most of them. 

Besides applying automatic voter registration to more agencies, HB 4983 would also greatly change how the program works—even at driver’s license offices. 

Right now, Michiganders are asked whether they want to opt out of having the state register them to vote in the course of the transaction in which they’re getting or updating an ID. Under HB 4983, they would no longer be asked this question while conducting this other business; instead, they would later be sent a mailer at home, and they would have to return it if they wish to not be registered.

This is known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. Data from Colorado, which has also opted for such a model, show that this system dramatically reduces the share of people who choose to opt out. This year alone, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., have adopted similar legislation to switch from “front-end” to “back-end” models. Oregon’s bill, like Michigan’s, also extends its program to apply to Medicaid.

The Medicaid change comes with an asterisk, though: States cannot enact it without the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up such reforms. 

Asked about Michigan’s bill, the Biden administration told Bolts this week that it is reviewing the issue, echoing an earlier statement it shared with Bolts in July about Oregon’s bill.

“We recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in its new statement. “CMS is considering additional opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration while also ensuring compliance with Medicaid confidentiality requirements.” 

But Michigan would not need to wait for any approval to enlist its prison system into expanding voter rolls.

In fact, the state has already begun experimenting with this reform through administrative changes. According to the secretary of state’s office, Michigan has given people exiting any state prison the opportunity to register to vote since 2020, through a program that helps them obtain a state ID as they re-enter society. 

HB 4983 would substantially build on that administrative effort, codifying it into law to make it a requirement for the DOC to register people. It’d also expand it to anyone released from prison independent of an ID program, and switch the procedure to a back-end model.

Michigan is particularly well positioned to leverage the point at which people leave prison to register to vote, since it’s among 24 states where people regain the right to vote as soon as they exit the prison, without any of the long waiting periods or onerous additional conditions that many other states impose. (In Maine and Vermont, plus D.C., anyone can also vote from prison) 

Erica Peresman, a voting rights attorney in Michigan, told Bolts that many formerly incarcerated people are currently disinclined to register because they’re worried about whether they’re allowed. 

“They’d be afraid of doing something wrong,” said Peresman, who is senior advisor at the Michigan nonprofit Promote the Vote. “We’d be out there at voter registration drives and people would say, ‘no, I have a felony on my record.’ They didn’t want to get in trouble, and they weren’t necessarily going to listen to some lady standing on the street with a clipboard.”

HB 4983 would solve some of that problem; formerly incarcerated people would no longer have to wonder whether it’s safe to register because the state would automatically do that for them and send them a mailer. 

Still, advocates say Michigan should go further. The state will need a “massive voter education effort” to complement the new policy, said Peresman, who warns that many who stand to be affected by the state’s recent expansions to voter rights may still not realize that they’ve been registered, or that that they could take advantage of new voting procedures like vote-by-mail

Tsernoglou, the bill’s sponsor, agrees. She wanted the legislature to also pass another bill that would have required the Department of Corrections to provide people with specific information about their voting rights. That bill, HB 4534, would have required prison officials to tell people who exit incarceration that they are eligible to vote, how to obtain a mail ballot, and when elections are held in Michigan. (The secretary of state’s office says it already provides some of this info to people leaving prison; HB 4534 would expand and codify enshrine that in law.)

The bill did not pass either chamber before the legislature adjourned last week. “I think that bill would be a prime example of something we could do additionally, next year,” Tsernoglou told Bolts. 

Another issue that the reform will likely run into is that some people who leave prison don’t have a stable address to provide. Khyla Craine, deputy legal director in the secretary of state’s office, told Bolts that her office allows people with unstable housing situations to update their addresses online; the state would work with parole and probation officers, plus community organizations like Percy Glover’s, to make sure people know how to do this, she said.

Glover said that a bill like HB 4983 can only go so far if the state does not also step up its investment in the success of people re-entering society, ensuring they have access to jobs and housing. 

“Voter economics is real,” he said. “If you are impoverished, you are not thinking about an election, and most people leaving a prison are not walking into a strong financial position. Finding somewhere to live, having transportation, having basic needs met—that’s the priority.”

The plan to automatically register people leaving prison is “very important,” he added, “but we won’t see significant turnout, as we should, without all these other layers.”

The post Michigan Law Is First to Automatically Register People to Vote As They Leave Prison appeared first on Bolts.

Lawmakers in Oregon, a state that already leads the nation in electoral engagement, adopted legislation this summer that would make voting even more inclusive. If it is signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, House Bill 2107 would instruct state Medicaid offices to automatically register people to vote when they open or renew a health plan. 

The bill could add tens of thousands of people to voter rolls by allowing the Oregon Health Authority to forward basic information it collects from people applying for Medicaid coverage—age, residence, and citizenship status—to election officials. These officials would then use it to register anyone who is eligible to vote and but not already signed up to do so.

This process, which would still give people the chance to decline being registered, is nearly identical to Oregon’s existing system of automatically registering people. But that system only applies at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services department, leaving out Oregonians who don’t visit the DMV. 

“Voter registration shouldn’t be dependent on going to the DMV, because not everybody does,” said Isabela Villarreal, policy director for Next Up Action Fund, a group that helped bring automatic voter registration to Oregon in 2015, explaining that lower-income and younger Oregonians are less likely to use DMV services. “We just want to make sure we’re capturing every single person and allowing them to participate.”

According to the secretary of state’s office, 85 percent of all Oregonians who are not registered are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that serves people living near or below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 170,000 people in this state of 4.2 million who could be added to the voter rolls if the state began automatically registering Medicaid recipients. 

“This is a critical opportunity to register people that have been historically and currently excluded from our electoral systems,” Villarreal said.

The reform, however, comes with a catch: It would not actually change anything unless Oregon wins the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up similar proposals in other states and told Bolts it’s still reviewing the issue. Medicaid is a program administered by states but regulated by the federal government, which largely bars a state’s Medicaid office from disclosing information to other agencies without the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ authorization.

Colorado, for one, adopted a reform similar to Oregon’s in 2019, only to see the federal agency that administers Medicaid stall its application over privacy concerns. Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, shared her frustration with Bolts last week, saying she struggles to even get answers from federal officials. “It would be great for Colorado to implement it,” she said. “We should be working to streamline people’s interactions with the government.”

Advocates for expanding voter registration hope that the growing number of states seeking to automatically register Medicaid recipients will motivate the Biden administration to revisit its stance and greenlight new  reforms in Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oregon eight years ago became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, and today similar systems exist in almost half of U.S. states. The design differs greatly by state, but the core idea is simple: Instead of expecting people to take proactive steps to register, a government agency uses the information they already collect to register people, while still giving them an opportunity to opt out. 

AVR has been proven to boost registration and turnout, and make the electorate more diverse. In Oregon, roughly 94 percent of eligible residents are now registered to vote. 

But in Oregon, as in many states, AVR is limited to people who visit the DMV, an agency with which many people, especially low-income residents, just don’t interact. Oregon voting rights advocates say this helps explain why nearly 200,000 eligible voters in the state—roughly 6 percent of the voting-eligible population—remain unregistered. They’re hoping that reaching Medicaid recipients gets the state closer to universal registration.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a national voter advocacy organization, says including Medicaid recipients would make AVR systems far more inclusive. 

“These are the people who generally fall through the cracks in our voter registration system: people who might be more transient, people who are less affluent, people who are unable to take time off work to go vote, older individuals who don’t have their documentation in order,” she told Bolts. “These are the type of people that, in general, face more barriers to the ballot. If we can reach those people with something like this, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who has until late July to take action on HB 2107, did not respond to questions for this story. Local observers told Bolts they expect she will sign the legislation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, have already had the same idea and passed legislation to extend AVR systems to government health programs. “The DMV seemed like the big first place to get the most people registered,” Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, told Bolts. “We believe Medicaid is that second place.”

But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency housed within HHS that oversees the Medicaid program, has left most of those states in limbo for years. Oregon may be next, as state officials there say HB 2107 cannot be implemented without CMS authorization. 

CMS rules bar state Medicaid agencies from using or disclosing client data for purposes that are not directly connected to the Medicaid program, but a state can request a waiver to implement a specific proposal, or ask CMS to determine that the way in which it plans to use the data is indeed legitimately connected to health care administration. Medicaid law experts say the prohibition exists to protect people from having their information used against them—police can’t turn to Medicaid for a person’s last known address, for instance, nor can prosecutors in states that punish abortion patients.

Colorado’s attempt to implement AVR through Medicaid has gone nowhere since 2019, first under the Trump administration through early 2021, and then under the Biden administration. When Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter to CMS last year imploring the agency to green-light Colorado’s reform, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote back that the agency “had previously concluded that [the state’s proposal] appears to be inconsistent with the Medicaid privacy protections in current laws and regulations.” 

But Brooks-LaSure, who was nominated to the position by President Biden, also referred to an executive order Biden issued soon after his inauguration directing all agency heads to “evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.” Brooks-LaSure added that CMS is “exploring opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration.”

CMS told Bolts in a statement on Monday that “this issue is under review.”

CMS did not say whether it had reached any new conclusion since Brooks-LaSure’s letter to Bennet more than a year ago. When Bolts first reached out to CMS seeking clarity, the agency said in a statement that AVR systems “may” breach Medicaid’s confidentiality rules but a CMS spokesperson reached out days later to say the agency’s initial response had been rushed and “provided in error,” and reflected the view of the Trump administration. The agency then issued another statement that kept the door open to new state initiatives.

“In keeping with the President Biden’s Executive Order directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, we recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” CMS said. 

CMS did not reply to follow-ups requesting more information about its review process.

The picture gets fuzzier considering Medicaid services are already automatically registering people in Massachusetts. States Newsroom reported last week that the state had seen a large jump in registration as a result. 

Michelle Tassinari, an attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, told Bolts she is confident that the state is compliant with federal rules because Massachusetts asks people, during their initial interactions with the health agency, if they’d prefer that their information not be used for the purpose of voter registration. Washington state also registers people through its health agency using a similar approach, a process known as “front-end” AVR. 

Automatic voter registration looks different in Oregon, as well as in Colorado. Instead of being asked if they want to opt out of registering during their transaction with an agency, prospective voters receive a mailer later on; they must respond to it if they do not wish to be registered. Data show that this approach, known as a “back-end” system, registers many more people to vote than when people are asked up-front, and more states have been switching to this model.

CMS did not answer Bolts’ questions when asked if these design distinctions were relevant to how the federal government is assessing state-level AVR programs. 

This confusion reflects what officials in the states that are in limbo have experienced. 

Griswold told Bolts that she’d be happy to hear the federal agency’s specific concerns and reach a workable solution, including by adjusting the exact design of Colorado’s system, but that CMS hasn’t even created the opportunity or shared precise feedback.

“We do not see a big difference between AVR at the DMV versus at Medicaid offices,” Griswold said. “If CMS thinks there’s a big difference, we can always address that in the law, we can go back and tighten the law if they want. But they need to give us guidance.”

Griswold doesn’t dispute the importance of protecting privacy but she believes this isn’t that complicated or fraught. “I think you can design the system where states never interact with the underlying data,” she said. “We do not need to know anything about people’s medical information, nor do we want to know that information.”

Other election experts also point out that the design of existing AVR systems already integrates privacy protections. The goal, they say, is to make use of data the government already collects without weaponizing it.

“If it’s administered correctly, I don’t see it being any different than [automatic voter registration] through the DMV,” Lacey Donaldson, the elected clerk in Pershing County, Nevada, and the head of that state’s county clerk association, told Bolts. Nevada’s plans for automatic registration of Medicaid recipients is also in limbo due to CMS.

One difference between the DMV and health services is that Medicaid recipients interact with the state more frequently. In Oregon, Medicaid recipients must renew their plans and update their information—including their mailing address—annually, whereas many people go years without visiting the DMV. This means that administering an AVR system through Medicaid would be likelier to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

“This is a win-win-win-win for lots of different people,” says Amber McReynolds, a national expert in election procedures who was appointed to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors by Biden. “The people who want to make sure more people are registered to vote, for people who care about making sure voters addresses are accurate, for people who want more efficient government. It’s one of these concepts I always think that everybody should like.”

In Oregon, the concept was championed by Shemia Fagan while she was secretary of state. Fagan, a Democrat, resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she’d been accepting lucrative consultant payments from cannabis entrepreneurs who have been top donors to her political career. Still, the legislation passed based on strong support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers; Republicans opposed the legislation. 

Other states may soon join the CMS waiting chamber. A new bill introduced last month in New Jersey proposes expanding that state’s AVR system to include Medicaid services.

“We’re hopeful that CMS will reconsider its reading of the law, which we think is currently incorrect,” Griswold said. “State pressure is mounting.”

The post Oregon Wants to Register Medicaid Recipients to Vote. Will Biden Officials Allow It? appeared first on Bolts.

One reform, which drew the ire of congressional Republicans, will enable noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. The second largely flew under the radar of national politicians, and will overhaul the city’s approach to voter registration. 

Underlying the Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, that seemingly technical bill, is a challenge to a core aspect of U.S. elections. Why put a burden of registration on prospective voters when public authorities can determine who is eligible on their own? 

Going forward, D.C. will use the information it collects when residents interact with public agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles to create a running list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on this list, there will be no need to register in advance of an election; all they will have to do is vote.

This new law would pair with a reform that the council has adopted but is not yet law, which would set up universal mail-in voting: That bill would apply to people on the “preapproved” list. As a result, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible to vote—even if they have not registered. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote, in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote,” Councilmember Charles Allen told Bolts last year when he filed the bill. This act, he said, will “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard.”

The bill was approved unanimously by the D.C. council in December and signed by the mayor. It became law after the customary congressional review that all D.C. bills undergo expired this week. Republicans in Congress did not target this legislation, though they sought to block other recent city reforms, including a bill that enables noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

That noncitizen voting bill, known as the Local Residents Voting Rights Act, also became law this week. The U.S. House voted to block it in January in a resolution proposed by the GOP and supported by some Democrats, but the Senate did not follow up by the March 14 deadline that was set by the chamber’s parliamentarian. 

As a result, noncitizens who have been residents of D.C. for 30 days will be able to vote in local elections—including for mayor, city council, education board, and ballot initiatives. The law would not apply to federal elections.

“While we’re expanding voting rights here within our boundaries, Congress is attacking our autonomy altogether,” Brianne Nadeau, a D.C. councilmember who sponsored this bill, told Bolts this week. “It’s kind of a wild moment in history.” 

D.C. follows at least 15 other municipalities, including Maryland suburbs of D.C. such as Takoma Park, that already allow non-citizen voting. Most recently, voters in Oakland, California, approved a ballot measure in November to enable noncitizens to vote in school board races; in January, Vermont’s supreme court upheld several towns’ decision to enfranchise noncitizen residents. 

Similar proposals are on the table in other cities such as Boston. But the GOP is working in several states to preempt such local reforms.

A conservative group filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against D.C.’s new noncitizen voting law, claiming that it “dilutes the vote of every U.S. citizen voter in the District.” Nadeau says she also worries that Congress may still move to block the the funding needed to implement the measure; Congress has budgetary tools available to thwart D.C. measures beyond the congressional review period.

Proponents of the change say that restricting the franchise from noncitizens excludes a large swath of the population from decision-making. The Legal Aid Society of The District of Columbia testified before the council that more than 40,000 D.C. residents are not U.S. citizens, but many of them work, pay taxes in the District, or send children to public schools. They should have a say in their elected government, Nadeau said. 

“We have a special opportunity to show that getting involved locally can make a difference,” she said. By getting involved in municipal government, she added, “you can make change in a very short amount of time.”

The Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, D.C.’s other new law, only applies to U.S. citizens. It aims to draw into the process people who are already eligible to vote by building on D.C.’s prior reforms to voter registration.

The city already follows a model known as automatic voter registration, or AVR, along with more than 20 states. The idea is to use the fact that people from all walks of life are already interacting regularly with a DMV and other public agencies for reasons that have nothing to do with voting, like getting a driver’s license. While they’re there, the thinking goes, the government should take the opportunity to register them to vote. Studies have found that this approach boosts registration and turnout rates.

Some automatic registration programs, including the one D.C. currently uses, give residents the chance to opt out of registering while they’re still conducting the transaction with an agency. Many people take the chance to opt out up-front, often because they’re in a hurry and believe that declining will get them out the door faster, or because they may have questions about their eligibility. 

The new law switches D.C. into another model, known as “back-end.” Residents who are automatically registered are offered the chance to opt out later on: They will receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado made this switch in 2019 and saw its registration rates soar as a result. Testifying last fall in support of D.C.’s change, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold said that under the state’s prior “front-end” system, roughly 60 percent of eligible residents were opting out. After the switch, Colorado found that more than 99 percent remained registered after receiving the post-transaction mailer.

Allen, the sponsor of the D.C. law, told Bolts he drew inspiration from Colorado. 

But his proposal also goes beyond this “back-end” approach. It charts a new path that no longer treats registration as a step that residents must take before voting. 

Requiring voter registration, says Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., “creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” Historically, he told Bolts, this barrier has suppressed the electoral influence of poor people, immigrants, and people of color. 

Under the new law, the city will identify people who, based on information they’ve already provided the government, are eligible to vote. They will then receive a ballot in the mail. For those individuals, the only decision would be to vote, or not. 

Still, people added to the “preapproved” list in D.C. would be sent a mailer that gives them an opportunity to remove their name.

The new law also does not get rid of voter registration. The city would inform people that returning the mail-in ballot or heading to the polls would activate their registration. In effect, voting itself would be the act of registration.

But D.C.’s reform may still leave some residents behind since it hinges on them heading into specific public agencies. People who do not interact with the DMV or a Medicaid office would not be added to this “preapproved” list. 

“I would caution that there are still people who will not be offered registration opportunities, particularly people who do not interact regularly with government agencies like the driver’s license offices,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who studies turnout.

D.C. has for years offered same-day voter registration, so those people would have the opportunity to head to a polling location during the early voting period or on Election Day. They would not receive a mail-in ballot, though. 

McDonald does not expect the new law to make a major change to turnout in D.C. given the city’s unique circumstances. “The fact that the city is highly uncompetitive and the District has limited self-rule probably matter more,” he said.

D.C. is already facing new attacks on its self-rule. Last week, some House Republicans launched a new push to overturn a set of policing reforms, known as the city’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act, adopted by the D.C. government to expand citizen oversight of police and limit police use of dangerous weapons against protesters, among other provisions. 

Nadeau said, “Recent congressional action makes it clear that any of the work we do in the District of Columbia is very precarious as long as we don’t have statehood.” 

The post Pair of Reforms to Expand the Electorate Become Law in D.C. appeared first on Bolts.

On his first day in office on Monday, Allen terminated Alabama’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a consortium of roughly 30 states that share data about their voter rolls to keep them up to date, citing concerns about data privacy.

“I made a promise to the people of Alabama that ending our state’s relationship with the ERIC organization would be my first official act as Secretary of State,” he said.

Allen’s quick move, fueled by right-wing conspiracies about ERIC that spread last year, alarmed election administration professionals. 

“Anything that makes elections more secure is a target for the election deniers, and the attacks on ERIC are just another tactic in this effort,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, an organization that works closely with election administrators. 

Becker, who is a non-voting member of ERIC’s board after helping spearhead its launch a decade ago, attributed the decision to the lies about election administration spread by election deniers. 

Allen first promised he would leave ERIC on the campaign trail last year, shortly after the conservative website Gateway Pundit published a series of stories falsely tying ERIC to George Soros, the progressive-leaning billionaire. Those stories, which called ERIC a “left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” spread among Republicans who were already fanning other conspiracies about election administration, helping turn ERIC into a target of far-right organizations. Allen himself referred to Soros in explaining his hostility to ERIC in early 2022. 

ERIC is financially supported by its member states, including many staunchly red ones that are governed by Republicans, such as South Carolina and Texas, as well as many blue states. The current chair of ERIC, Mandi Grandjean, is the deputy assistant secretary of state of Ohio under Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Trump-endorsed Republican. 

John Merrill, Alabama’s outgoing secretary of state whom Allen replaced, and a Republican known for his own poor record on voting rights—he threatened to go after hundreds voters who mistakenly thought they could vote in a partisan runoff, failed to inform voters of their rights, and lashed out at critics of the state’s voting rights record—steadfastly defended ERIC throughout 2022. 

“This continued narrative of ERIC being a George Soros system is untrue. ERIC was not founded nor funded by George Soros, and to claim otherwise is either dishonest or misinformed,” Merrill said in November. Becker echoed that characterization on Wednesday. “Putting aside the nature of those attacks, it’s just 100 percent false,” he said. 

Tammy Patrick, the CEO of Election Center, a national organization that represents election administrators, stressed that ERIC was built to meet the practical needs of officials from both parties. “From its inception ERIC has been a bipartisan effort,” she told Bolts on Wednesday. “The policies and functionality were all created taking into account the perspectives of election administrators from across the political spectrum.

Voter registration across the United States is largely in the hands of local offices whose resources are limited, in part due to insufficient federal funding, creating strains that private or non-profit organizations have filled. This has, in turn, opened the door for right-wing conspiracies about those funding sources, leading to efforts by some conservatives to further cut off external assistance to local election offices.

First launched in 2012, ERIC is one of those organizations. Its member states share their voter rolls with ERIC, which matches them to one another and to other agencies like Social Security to identify duplicates and to clean the voter rolls of people who have moved or died. 

“ERIC is the first and still only tool that states have to be able to keep up with the mobility of the American public,” Becker said. “People move a lot in the United States, and that means voter lists are often out of date, and keeping up with all that mobility is a real challenge.” Becker added that ERIC can also flag when a voter has cast a ballot in two different states in the same election, a guardrail against fraud. Where voter rolls are not cleaned up or are discovered to have errors, Republican politicians are often quick to point to erroneous voter rolls to make false claims of fraud.

“ERIC allows states to basically combine forces and share data with each other in a system that they themselves run,” Becker said.

If a state is not part of ERIC, Patrick said, local election officials will face a higher burden to run and update their systems.

“ERIC states have the advantage of sophisticated data-matching engines to aid in keeping their voter rolls as accurate as possible—this can be a monumental task for election administrators given the transient nature of the voting population and the consistent under-funding of our election infrastructure,” Patrick told Bolts. 

Becker agreed that the departure from ERIC would erode the state’s voter lists, which could lead to a cascade of problems. 

“Voter lists are going to be less accurate, they’re going to have more people who have moved out of Alabama who are on their lists, they will likely have more people who have died remain on their list because ERIC is very good at identifying people who died, they are likely going to see an increase in things like provisional ballots and returned mail, which are consequences of having out-of-date lists, and they are going to lose access to one of the great tools to investigate potential fraud,” he told Bolts.

Allen’s office did not reply to a request for comment. In his statement, Allen raised concerns about the threats to the privacy and security of registered voters’ information when Alabama shares its data with ERIC and other states. 

“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months,” Allen said. 

Allen is one of four Republicans who aligned with election deniers in raising false doubts about the results of the 2020 presidential election, and then won a secretary of state election in 2022. All four prevailed in reliably Republican states, while election deniers who ran in the traditional battleground states like Arizona or Michigan failed, but voting rights advocates have warned to not look past places like Alabama. 

While in the legislature, Allen sponsored and supported legislation restricting ballot access in the name of combating voter fraud, such as a bill that was signed into law in 2021 that codified Merrill’s efforts to ban curbside voting in the state. In his run for secretary of state, Allen echoed other Trumpian conspiracies regarding mail-in voting and promised there would be “no drop boxes” in Alabama if elected. 

Becker pointed out that election deniers often go after voting and counting procedures that are known to be secure, such as ballot drop boxes, attacks he compared to the claims about ERIC.

“Individuals who spread these lies are actually attacking election integrity, and the infrastructure of election integrity, while they use language related to election integrity,” Becker said.

The post Alabama’s New Election-Denying Secretary of State Leaves Group That Helps States Clean Voter Rolls appeared first on Bolts.

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

From the very first days of early voting, voters queued in long lines all around the state waiting to cast their ballots in person. Some polling sites in the Atlanta metro area had estimated wait times of two to three hours.

A handful of counties offered Saturday voting on Nov. 26 after Thanksgiving, despite objections from the state’s Republican leadership, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The majority of the state opened the polls on Monday Nov. 28, which saw a record 300,000 people turn out. According to the secretary of state’s website, more than 1.7 million votes have been cast in early voting so far.

Speaking with Bolts, Crystal Greer from Protect the Vote GA, a grassroots group formed to combat voter suppression, said the current scramble to turn out voters was exactly what voting advocates worried about after the passage of Senate Bill 202 shortly after the 2020 election and Senate runoff. 

“We knew that what we’re seeing right now is what that bill was pretty much created to do,” Greer said. “The lines you’re seeing right now are not a good sign. A form of voter suppression.”

Just as they did two years before, Georgians are turning out to decide an open Senate seat in a runoff election after no clear winner emerged in the contest between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Senator. Control of the Senate is not at stake this time, but Democrats are looking to expand their majority.

But unlike the 2020 election, where the runoff period lasted nearly two months, this cycle there’s approximately four weeks with only five days of mandated early voting. Republicans tightened the runoff election period with a provision in SB 202 last year, a move that advocates at the time worried would make voter turnout more difficult.

The bill, signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp in 2021 with support from Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans, created myriad new obstacles for people who want to take part in the runoff. It has meant, for one, that people could not register to vote after Nov. 8 because there isn’t enough time for them to get on the voter rolls, unlike in the run-up to the 2021 runoffs. 

It also shortens the window to vote by mail, a procedure that Democrats have rushed toward since the pandemic; voters had less time to request a mail-in ballot (that deadline was Nov. 25) and must mail it back by the deadline of runoff Election Day. It also limited the use of secure absentee ballot drop boxes to only during the early voting period. Ballot drop-off was further restricted to the times early voting polling stations are open, versus 24-hour availability in 2020. 

That change has added pressure on the state’s in-person voting facilities, as already short-staffed polling places have had to simultaneously certify the results of the general election and prepare for the runoff election. Capacity has been a factor in the serpentine lines voters have had to contend with. 

Most contentiously, the shorter window threatened the viability of weekend voting. Raffensperger’s office originally interpreted the law to prohibit early voting on Saturday, Nov. 26, due to an existing law saying that voting cannot be held immediately following a state holiday. A lawsuit filed before Thanksgiving challenged Raffensperger’s determination, leading upwards of 22 out of 159 counties to open locations for Saturday voting. 

All of these restrictions have impacted students home for the holidays and full-time workers unable to wait in line during the week, for whom the importance of weekend voting—along with these other alternative methods of voting—cannot be stressed nearly enough. 

During a press briefing, Vasu Abhiraman, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia, spoke about the challenges the tight timeline and confusion around Saturday voting caused for many voters, including students. 

“We had short lines on Election Day two years ago, for both the general election and the runoff, because there were robust early voting opportunities and opportunities to vote by mail,” Abhiraman said. “What do we see here for the runoff? Well, we see absentee by mail, nearly an impossible proposition. We have been contacted by so many out-of-state students who are worried about voting absentee by mail.” 

Abhiraman said he waited an hour and 45 minutes to vote at a library in DeKalb County in metro Atlanta. 

Besides the confluence of issues during this runoff that stems from SB 202, Raffensperger’s actions as secretary of state have fueled challenges. Raffensperger gained national attention for opposing then-President Donald Trump’s subversion effort in 2020, but he then channeled that reputation to defend the GOP’s changes to voting laws. 

“The cries of ‘voter suppression’ from those on the left ring as hollow as the continuously debunked claims of ‘mass voter fraud’ in Georgia’s 2020 election,” he said in 2021.

But Raffensperger has a history of fanning the flames of suspicions about election integrity; in the 2020 primary he created a criminal task force to investigate alleged absentee ballot fraud after mailing all eligible Georgia voters an absentee ballot application. (Nearly two years later, the group’s investigation found virtually no fraud.) After the general election, Raffensperger created a process with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct a signature audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County, something he previously had indicated was not possible. 

In the run-up to the runoff, he issued guidance claiming the provision of Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff was prohibited by a state statute, even though he had not challenged Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Jan. 5, 2021, runoff. Even after Saturday voting was allowed to proceed, Raffensperger’s office signaled to the state legislature it should address “the confusion.” That could result in an outright ban on Saturday voting in future runoffs. Georgia Republicans retained control of the state government on Nov. 8, so they have the ability to further restrict voting laws in their next legislative session. 

Meanwhile, students like Madeline Berns are already experiencing challenges trying to vote. Berns told Bolts that she lives an hour south of where she currently attends school. Planning to vote in the 2022 general election, Berns said she applied for an absentee ballot on Sept. 23. She said the ballot was issued on Oct. 11 but never received it. 

“On Election Day, I had to skip school and leave a medical appointment early to vote at my assigned polling place,” Berns said. “It took about three hours out of my day and 80 miles worth of gas. The poll workers hadn’t filed a provisional ballot before, so they were confused. We got it worked out, though.”

​​Reflecting on the 2020 election, Berns said she voted absentee without issue. With the tight turnaround for the runoff election, she planned to drive home on Election Day.  

“I don’t want to risk that again, so I didn’t apply for another absentee ballot,” she said. “My county didn’t have early voting when I was home for Thanksgiving. It’s unfortunate because I’ll be in the middle of finals season, but I think it’s important.”

Voting rights advocates and engagement organizers say the secretary of state should have done more to ensure voters had the best information available about polling locations and voting options. County election boards, which in the 2020 election took advantage of donations from voting-focused non-profit organizations such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life to fund election administration, were banned from directly receiving such funding under SB 202. The secretary of state’s office has the power to step up its assistance, but so far has not, leaving non-profit organizations to stand in the gap.

During a press briefing at the start of early voting, Stephanie Ali, policy director at the New Georgia Project, said the coalition reached out to officials in each of the state’s 159 counties to get the correct information out to voters. According to Ali, the secretary of state’s site had little to no information going into the weekend early voting. 

“We did the legwork,” said Ali. “This is work that shouldn’t have to be done by nonprofit organizations. It shouldn’t have to be done by political entities. It should be done by our counties, especially our Secretary of State.”

Greer said that some polling locations around the state needed more workers on site, resulting in long lines during early voting. She attributed the poll worker shortage partly to the increased attacks on poll workers in the aftermath of the 2020 election. 

“You have this bottleneck happening in these lines because there’s only two people working or something like that,” she said. “There’s no incentive to hire new poll workers. And also make them feel safe.”

The various accounts of workers being doxxed, harassed and threatened created a chilling effect for some who might otherwise sign up. Greer also said proper training was an issue. 

“We’re still evolving with these voting machines, and so if something goes down, there’s just not enough adequate training for that person to reboot it,” she said. “The line literally stops. Nothing’s happening until that gets fixed.”

Greer said the voter protection coalition would continue fighting for improvements in election administration and expanding ballot access. Georgia voters have remained resilient and continued to vote regardless of wait times and tight deadlines, right up through the final hours of early voting.

Berns believes schools could do more to help students engage in the electoral process, like having Election Day as a school holiday.

“I don’t even think it’s an excused absence here,” she said. “It would be better, though, to just make sure absentee ballots are approved, sent, and received in a timely fashion.”

Joanna Louis-Ugbo, a student at Emory University and organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, echoed the importance of making voting accessible for students. 

“We had to fight to keep our precinct on campus because a lot of these students do not have cars or transportation to go to a precinct that will be a little bit further out,” Louis-Ugbo said. “It’s very important to have precincts on these campuses.”

The post Long Lines, Short Windows: How Georgia’s New Restrictive Voting Law Complicates the Senate Runoff appeared first on Bolts.

Washington, D.C., may soon do away with voter registration as most Americans know it. Under a new bill, set to have its first council hearing on Friday, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered.

Drawing inspiration from Colorado, which many voting-rights experts characterize as the national standard for accessibility, the city would take information it collects when residents interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies to maintain a constantly-updating list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on that list, all there would be left to do is to vote come election time. 

“Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” Charles Allen, the D.C. councilmember who is sponsoring the legislation, told Bolts. “It’s a way to be a gatekeeper as to who you think should be able to vote.” 

Under Allen’s bill, voting itself would be the act of registration—at least for those the city identifies as prequalified. This would “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard,” Allen said.

D.C. already enacts a policy known as automatic voter registration. First adopted in Oregon in 2015, it has since spread to more than twenty states, plus D.C., as a tool to expand voter rolls. (It largely exists in Democratic-run states, with some exceptions.) The idea is that instead of the traditional approach of waiting for people to opt in being registered, agencies like the DMV make it the default to register them to vote and then give them the opportunity to opt out of the rolls. Studies have found that this policy has boosted registration and turnout rates.

But in most places with automatic voter registration, the policy is falling short of its promise. Many people who enter the DMV unregistered are still not registered when they leave. Neal Ubriani, policy and research director at the Institute for Responsive Government, an organization that promotes efficiency in government, and an advisor to Allen on the D.C. bill, says this boils down to how these systems are designed.

When they go to to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license or get an ID card, D.C. residents are currently told that their information will be used to register them to vote, they are shown a list of criteria they must meet, and they are given the option to refuse registration by checking a box: “I decline/opt out. Do not register me to vote or update my voter registration.”

Ubriani said systems like D.C.’s on average have about a 50 percent opt-out rate. Some just want to leave the DMV and think that by opting out they’ll avoid more time and questions; some may not be sure whether they are eligible; others might trust themselves to update their voter registration on their own; or they may believe (falsely, in many cases) that their registration is up-to-date and not tied to a previous address.

D.C.’s design is known as “front-end” since people are asked whether they want to opt-out while still at the DMV. Most states with automatic voter registration do the same. 

“I’ve seen states that call themselves AVR systems that have an 80 percent declination rate at the DMV,” Ubriani said.

Allen wants his bill to fix that problem. “We already have a version of automatic voter registration, and this really takes it further,” he told Bolts.

Allen says he looked toward the handful of states like Oregon, Alaska and Colorado that have gone a different route, implementing a design known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. There, people who provide documents that indicate that they are U.S. citizens are automatically registered to vote and they are not asked any further questions while at the public agency; they later receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt-out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado switched from a “front-end” system to a “back-end” one in 2019, and a recent study conducted by two political science professors at Stanford University found that the switch successfully activated voters. It drastically cut down the rate of people who opted out: Less than one percent of the people who were sent a mailer returned it indicating they declined registration. This sent registration in Colorado soaring, roughly doubling the registration rate for DMV customers who were previously unregistered. About 250,000 Coloradoans were automatically registered to vote during the first year of implementation, and about half voted.

Amanda Gonzalez was a voting rights advocate as then-executive director of Common Cause Colorado in 2019 when she helped draft and lobby for these changes. “I think the question we probably should be asking ourselves is, what is the system that is going to best facilitate the most participation?” she told Bolts.

Allen has an answer, telling Bolts, “We want to make it as automatic as possible.”

His bill would not exactly move D.C. to a “back-end” system like Colorado’s because it wouldn’t outright register people. But it’s guided by a similar principle that it’s really up to public authorities to review someone’s eligibility based on the information they’ve already shared. Under his proposal, as long as someone has provided certain documents, the city would verify and record them as eligible: This would pre-qualify them as voters, even when they’re not formally on voter rolls. 

D.C. would then send people on this preapproved list a mail-in ballot for every election during the following two years. They would never need to proactively register, though they would be given an opportunity to remove their name from this list through a mailer. D.C. would also inform them that they can return a ballot or head to the polls to activate their registration. All they would need to do at that point is choose whether or not to vote.

Ubriani thinks that this would break the mold of how we usually approach elections. “It’s not mythologizing this first antecedent step (registering to vote) as some important, necessary civic duty,” he said.

Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., has documented that the emergence of registration laws made voting a two-step process that had exclusionary effects.

Voter registration requirements gained widespread popularity in the U.S. starting in the 1870s. The result was to deny some people the ability to vote, or at least to make exercising their right more difficult. “We know historically that those people have tended to be poor people and people of color and immigrants—people who haven’t had the resources,” he told Bolts.

He added, “It creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” 

The bill pending in D.C. would chip away at that barrier. Still, the policy would only cover people who interact with select agencies, mainly at the DMV and when filling a Medicaid application. What of people who don’t go to those agencies? There are efforts nationwide to include automatic voter registration with a broad array of public services—–some of which would need approval from the Biden administration—and some want to eliminate voter registration altogether.

Allen says he’s open to expanding his D.C. proposal to use data collected in other settings— perhaps at libraries or public recreation centers—to build a more comprehensive “preapproved” list of voters. 

That can get tricky, though. The DMV is an ideal setting not only because it’s a place visited by people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and races. It’s also a place where citizenship questions are already being asked, and all sorts of information relevant to voting, such as age and home address, are already collected. With relatively low effort, a government interested in boosting participation can simply use information the DMV was going to gather anyway.

Expanding this program to, say, libraries or recreation centers would mean asking people about their immigration status in more settings, citizenship being an obvious prerequisite to voting, and that’s a step many balk at.

“I love the idea of libraries, but those aren’t places that currently do citizenship checks, nor should they be,” said Gonzalez, the Colorado advocate who is now the Democratic nominee running for county clerk in Jefferson County, outside of Denver. “We don’t want to create new places where people are being asked to verify their citizenship.”

Some voting right organizations like the Brennan Center worry about these immigration issues even at the DMV, which has led them to criticize “back-end” systems; they say that registering people without asking them immediately if they want to opt out could mistakenly add noncitizens to the polls.

Ubriani says that these risks are already present in D.C.’s current “front-end” system, which is designed to pose registration-related questions to DMV clients even when they are not U.S. citizens. That means people who affirmatively show a document making clear their lack of citizenship still get asked about voter registration. “That’s sort of like a trap for the unwary,” Ubriani said. “If I miss that question, if I’m less English-proficient or confused, even slightly inattentive during the transaction, suddenly I’ve incorrectly indicated citizenship.”

For Ubriani and Allen, this hazard adds to the flaws that they want D.C. to urgently fix.

Allen chairs the committee that his bill will start in, which makes for strong odds that the bill will advance past its first hearing on Friday. The bill would then have to be approved by the full city council and the mayor, and Congress would need to not intervene to repeal it.

The councilmember is simultaneously sponsoring a bill to enact universal mail voting; in 2022, all registered voters in D.C. are already set to receive a mail-in ballot due to pandemic-era rules, but this bill would make that permanent. Allen has also backed other measures to expand participation, including the landmark law that enabled people to vote from prison starting in 2020. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote,” Allen said, “in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote.”

—

Editor’s note: Neal Ubriani was a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit organization that runs Bolts from July 2021 to January 2022.

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