LM Otero/AP Photo
Aetry Jones, left, and Caerry Rigbon tape up a voter registration sign on Dallas City Hall before a Juneteenth 2020 celebration and protest against police brutality in Dallas.
Back in January, the U.S. looked poised for a year of record voter registration. In the dozen states that release easily available data, registrations that month surpassed their comparable 2016 figures, sometimes by 50 percent. California saw a jump from under 100,000 new registered voters in January 2016 to more than 150,000 in January 2020.
The advent of the coronavirus changed all that. In each of those 12 states, plus the District of Columbia, new registrations fell below their 2016 numbers by March and April. Overall, just 200,000 people registered to vote in April 2020, compared to nearly 700,000 in April 2016.
The hit to registration appears to have affected Democrats more than Republicans, according to a June report surveying ten contested states (Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). During March, April, and May, people who registered to vote in those areas were largely older, whiter, and more Republican than in the pre-coronavirus period. In Maine, the percentage of registered voters who identify as Democrats dropped 20 percent since state lockdowns began, from roughly 60 percent to 40 percent.
Despite record levels of enthusiasm among voters—including, and maybe especially, during police brutality protests this summer—the pandemic has frustrated registration efforts in key states. One of the most successful programs in the country, DMV registration, has shuttered. Most site-based registration, like tables at county fairs and door-to-door efforts, is also impossible. To complicate matters even more, a rising number of evictions means that voters may have to re-register at their new addresses.
Despite record levels of enthusiasm among voters—including, and maybe especially, during police brutality protests this summer—the pandemic has frustrated registration efforts in key states.
Although registrations dropped for both parties, the tilt toward Republicans might stem more from the nature of online registration than from brilliant strategy by the RNC or the Trump campaign. Kelly Beadle, who studies registration at Tufts’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, said data from past cycles suggests that online registration is less effective at reaching voters who “fall through the cracks”: young people, people of color, and low-income people; in other words, the people who tend to vote for Demorats when they vote at all.
In response to these challenges, digital voter registration groups have worked to improve their efforts, and formerly in-person groups have had to move online. In Texas, which only offers paper registration, the state Democratic Party launched a new website, registertexas.com, aimed at circumventing barriers presented by both the pandemic and Republican election officials. The party sends voters who provide their information prefilled forms complete with a stamped return envelope. Luke Warford, who directs voter expansion for the Texas Democratic Party, said he expects the program to become one of the largest registration initiatives in the country by November.
In states that do have online programs, online groups—which found relatively limited success in previous years—are also becoming an increasingly vital part of the registration landscape.
The advocacy group Voto Latino reported registering 63,158 new voters during the first ten days of June. Rock the Vote, another progressive operation, said it registered 50,000 voters over the first several days of the month. María Teresa Kumar, who runs the former group, said its success is based in guiding voters through every step of the registration and voting process over a period of months.
Still, the number of actual new voters may not match the impressive totals registration groups report. Because they don’t typically have access to official records, they can end up registering voters who either are already on the rolls or would have registered in any case.
“You could go to a shopping mall back in the old days and get a lot of people to fill out forms. But a lot of those people are already registered,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, noting that the trend holds true for online forms. “Actually, if there’s a lot of that, it could actually reduce the ability of election officials to get people registered because they’re dealing with duplicates.”
The nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)—which Becker founded—works to fix that problem. Launched in 2012, the now 30-member organization uses DMV data to provide states accurate lists of unregistered voters in exchange for the promise that they will make an effort to contact them ahead of federal elections.
By tracking voters who move across state lines, deaths, and duplicates, ERIC identifies exactly the voters that third-party targeting algorithms often miss. Between 2012 and 2019, the project said it found 34 million potential voters.
Until the federal government commits to expanding rather than frustrating the right to vote, solutions to the registration problems the pandemic has revealed will have to come mainly from states.
But even if they pursue targeted ad campaigns and sustained outreach, third-party groups don’t have access to DMV files. More to the point, they can’t change the legal barriers to registration in states that put in place or fix glitchy online systems. Just last week, for example, more than 2,000 voters in Arizona discovered that, even though they had filled out an online form through the state’s new online platform, they were not actually on the voter rolls.
“If you’re directing [citizens] to a secretary of state website that has you go through multiple pages to register, that’s multiple opportunities for something to crash. Or you’re going to a site that isn’t mobile-optimized when most people consume digital media on their mobile phones, that’s a hindrance,” said Tatenda Musapatike, the senior director of campaigns at the progressive digital registration group ACRONYM.
Until the federal government commits to expanding rather than frustrating the right to vote, solutions to the registration problems the pandemic has revealed will have to come mainly from states.
Some have already made progress. New York’s state assembly passed automatic registration two weeks ago, meaning every resident who doesn’t opt out will be automatically registered if they visit a state agency. Minnesota’s governor signed a bill allowing residents to use IDs that expired during the pandemic as proof of residency. Even North Carolina, the epicenter of voter suppression just four years ago, moved in June to lower absentee ballot witness requirements and fund election safety measures. Election officials and legislators in at least some states appear to have recognized the unique challenges of registering voters in this moment, and taken the first steps to rise to the occasion.
