Not a Typo: States Made 2019 a Historic Year for Election Reform

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Elaine Thompson/AP Photo

A batch of ballots at a county elections office in Reston, Washington, November 2018

As states like Texas and Georgia continue to make headlines for their extreme efforts to limit voting, a far greater number are actually going the other way. In fact, 2019 saw more states advance more election reforms than at any time since the progressive era of the early 20th century. Pro-voter policies ranging from same day registration, automatic voter registration, and voting rights restoration to redistricting reform and the National Popular Vote compact saw breakthrough gains.

While most of these reforms were enacted in states controlled by Democrats, in several states where Republican governors or legislators had acted to suppress the right to vote in 2016 and 2018, reforms were nonetheless enacted in 2019.

Florida and Kentucky ended lifetime voting bans for people with a past felony conviction, restoring voting rights for hundreds of thousands. Utah and Alaska started using ranked-choice voting for some elections, while advancing other reforms like expanded use of mail ballots to make it easier to vote. Michigan implemented voter-approved same day registration, automatic voter registration, no-excuse mail ballots, and a nonpartisan redistricting commission. Pennsylvania ended restrictions on using mail ballots and moved its voter registration deadline, giving voters two more weeks to register closer to the election. These successes indicate public support for voting rights even in states carried by Trump, and will help those states run fairer elections that encourage participation.

Here’s a rundown on eight prominent policies that made real gains in 2019.

Same Day Voter Registration (SDR)

SDR has been proven to increase voter turnout by between 3 percent and 7 percent in any state that adopts it. It also lets voters dropped from the list re-register or fix their registration when they most need it—when they go to vote.

• More states passed or implemented SDR laws in 2019 than any year in the policy’s 45-year history. These include Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Washington, and New Mexico.
• Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia now have adopted this time-tested policy. SDR is well-positioned to be a national standard every state must offer.

Automatic Voter Registration (AVR)

AVR automatically enrolls eligible citizens and updates existing registrations during motor vehicle and public agency transactions, unless the person affirmatively declines the option.

• Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, and Washington all passed or implemented AVR in 2019. First implemented in Oregon in 2016, it’s taken only three years to spread to 19 states

Vote at Home

The New York Times “Fixes” column cited Vote at Home among the year’s top five reforms across health, social issues, and democracy.

• Six states now have full Vote at Home policies. All registered voters are sent their ballot at least two to three weeks before the election. Voters have several options to return it, which they can do by mail or in-person at local drop-off locations, their election office, or vote centers open close to or on Election Day. Most vote in-person. Five of the states also have same day registration and voting at the vote centers. Another 28 states have the option of permanent or no-excuse mail ballots, with many exploring expanding to a more robust version.
• Full Vote at Home (six states): Hawaii and Utah will join Oregon, Washington, and Colorado with full implementation for the presidential election. California will use it in 20 counties on its way to statewide use.
• Permanent mail ballots (five states): In 2019 New Jersey and Nevada joined Arizona, Montana, and Wisconsin in giving voters the option to permanently receive a mail ballot.
• No excuse absentee voting (23 states): The swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania are among the latest to eliminate requiring an excuse to vote by mail.

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)

In 2019 Ranked choice voting became established nationally as the antidote to our plurality victor, winner-take-all, two party-only system. RCV ensures the winner has majority support, not just a plurality, which is often far less than 50 percent of the vote. Voters get more choices, their votes more clearly reflect their preferences, and third parties can compete without being spoilers.

Entering 2020, ranked-choice voting is now being used statewide in Maine, and in 20 cities in nine states. Five more states use it for military voters living overseas to enable them to participate in the states’ two-round runoff elections. In 2019:

• Maine expanded RCV to cover the 2020 presidential race.
• New York City voters overwhelmingly chose to use RCV for city primaries, where most city council and city offices are decided. Five more cities debuted it— Eastpointe, Michigan, Payson and Vineyard, Utah , Las Cruces, New Mexico (it is already used in Santa Fe), and St. Louis Park, Minnesota (it is already used in Minneapolis and St. Paul).
• Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada, and Wyoming opted to use it for the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries or caucuses.

Voting Rights Restoration

The U.S. stands out as the only world democracy to bar voting once a person is free from incarceration and rebuilding their life outside prison. 2019 saw major breakthroughs to end this Jim Crow-inspired prohibition.

• Three more states—Colorado, New Jersey, and Nevada—voted to restore rights to returning citizens immediately on their re-entry. Twenty states now restore full voting rights upon release from incarceration, laying the foundation for a post-incarceration restoration to become the national standard all states must adopt.
• Florida and Kentucky cracked open harsh, usually lifetime prohibitions. Florida moved to implement the voter-approved constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to people who have completed prison, parole and probation. And though the Florida legislature immediately moved to limit its effectiveness, a Florida judge has blocked, at least for now, the attempt to also require full payment of fines. In Kentucky, the new Democratic Governor Andy Beshear used his first days in office to issue an executive order restoring the right to vote to more than 140,000 non-violent offenders who’ve finished their prison sentence and supervised release.

Fair Redistricting

The high court’s failure in June to remedy extreme partisan redistricting didn’t stop a number of states from moving to nonpartisan redistricting commissions, nor did it prevent advocates from finding success in other state and federal courts.

• In Colorado, Michigan, and Missouri, nonpartisan commissions created by ballot measures in 2018 cleared hurdles to make them operational for the 2020 cycle. Spurious legal challenges by Republicans in Michigan and Missouri are not expected to stop them. These states’ move to nonpartisan commissions makes a total of eight states that have independent redistricting commissions with primary responsibility for drawing new congressional districts and 14 with such responsibility for state legislative districts. Montana is likely to join them when, as expected, it gets a second Congressional district out of the 2020 census. It already uses a commission to draw its state legislative districts.
• Challenges to partisan and racial gerrymandering won court victories in North Carolina and Mississippi, which have forced both states to redraw key districts in advance of the 2020 election.

Public Campaign Financing

Five more major U.S. cities adopted public financing programs. And in a David and Goliath story, activists in Seattle fended off Amazon’s massive cash infusion in city council races, and its attempt to circumvent the city’s public campaign democracy dollars program to install its favored candidates.

• In 2019 Baltimore, Denver, Portland, Oregon, Berkeley, California, and Washington, DC, inaugurated or moved to implement new public financing programs. At the same time, Albuquerque and Santa Fe upgraded their public systems to improve candidate participation.
• As of 2020, 17 cities have active public funding systems.
• At year’s end, New York State passed new campaign limits and a remarkably generous set of public matching funds for state legislative offices, and matches as high as 12- to -l for candidates for state office. It joined nine states that already had public funding programs.

Replacing the Electoral College

Republican support for the Electoral College spiked after 2016, dampening support for change. Still, the majority of the nation’s voters remain in support of deciding the Presidency by popular vote heading into 2020.

• In 2019, four new states—Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oregon—joined the National Popular Vote compact. It was its best year since first starting in 2008. The 16 states now in the compact represent 73 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed put it in effect.
• New proposals have emerged to achieve the same goal, but do so within the Electoral College framework. They would replace its most problematic and defining feature, the winner-take-all allocation of state electors. The proposals, by Equal Citizens, The New York Times Upshot, and others would allocate electoral votes proportionally based on votes cast.

While it was in states that major concrete progress was made, democracy did get significant federal attention, at least from Democrats. The House started the year by passing H.R.1, the For the People Act of 2019. The landmark legislation put into one bill a comprehensive set of policies to expand voting rights, diminish the role of money in politics, end gerrymandering, and strengthen ethics laws. The House then bracketed passage of H.R.1 at the end of the year by passing H.R.4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019. H.R.4 would restore the full capacity of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to combat vote suppression, and expands enforcement to all 50 states. The Republican-controlled Senate unsurprisingly refused to take up either bill. As a pair, were they enacted, these two laws would set a framework to monitor and punish racially and economically discriminatory practices, set clear national requirements and standards for how elections are run, and make major structural changes to American democracy.

Federal action of course awaits a different Congress and a different President. But 2019 stands out for the unprecedented number of reform victories at the state and local level, helping to create a real roadmap for change.