Commentary: Automatic Voter Registration Should Be Banned

Automatic voter registration creates an opportunity for fraud and registers people who really don’t want to vote

Automatic voter registration (AVR) creates a honeypot for voter fraud by bloating voter rolls—often in numbers above the actual population. It can allow noncitizens to register; and allows low-information, indifferent people to register who normally care nothing about voting. All of this results in the lowest common denominator getting elected to office, breeding corruption.

The push for AVR began during the middle of the last decade; today 24 states use it in some way. Usually, it consists of some combination of adding anyone who gets a driver’s license to the rolls, whether they care to register, or allowing them to opt out of registering when they get their license or a state government benefit. Thus the nickname: “Motor voter” laws.

In most states with AVR, Democratic-controlled legislatures passed it—although Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) took it upon himself to declare it via executive fiat. In West Virginia and Georgia, Republicans backed the measure. West Virginia Democrats opposed it only because it required photo ID. In Georgia, the Republican legislature and Gov. Nathan Deal (R) inadvertently helped Stacey Abrams turn the state purple by adding 681,000 new voters in three years—a weekly increase of 94 percent, according to the leftist Brennan Center.

Democrats have long pushed the radical narrative that low-information citizens who never vote or are low-propensity voters stay home on Election Day because of intimidation or disenfranchisement. They do correctly assume these lower-information citizens will likely vote based on government handouts and not on broader public policy, thereby benefitting the Democratic Party.

AVR saves Democrats and their donors a lot of money.

Over the past 20 years, Democrats and their GOTV machine have increasingly used tax-deductible nonprofits to register likely Democratic voters, guising it as “charity,” by claiming they perform a public service by registering historically marginalized people. But tax-deductible or not, that still accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars they could save their donors or reorient into campaign coffers if they could get state governments to do the registering for them. With everyone registered, they just have to turn them out. Also, once everyone is registered, it’s hard to undo because few Republicans would dare run on a platform to unregister people.

Democrats have repeatedly tried to ram AVR through nationwide. If the Senate had passed their For the People Act and Biden signed it, it not only would have forced AVR on every state, it would have allowed people to register on Election Day nationwide, flooding voter rolls with tens of millions of unverified voters, including noncitizens.

With moderate Democrats Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) no longer in the Senate—or the party for that matter—a future Democratic Senate majority with a Democratic president will likely immediately remove the filibuster and change American democracy as we know it, ensuring they never have to go through a 2024-style defeat again.

Until then, Democrats—as most Leftists do—satisfy themselves with incrementalism. Under the Biden-Harris administration, this included tasking federal agencies that serve likely Democratic voters with voter registration. One particular target: college students, one of the likeliest demographics to vote for them.

AVR poisons the democratic process in multiple ways.

First, not everyone should vote just like not everyone should drive a car.

States with AVR automatically register people when they get their driver’s license. But what makes drivers more worthy of voter registration than nondrivers? Voting also affects society more profoundly than driving a car. No state would dare hand out driver’s licenses to residents as soon as they turn 16. Many 16-year-olds may not yet be ready to drive. Others may have no interest in driving. If the state encourages reluctant drivers to get behind a wheel, a lot of innocent people could get hurt by that new driver’s choices. The same holds truer with voting. Voting is not only a right; it’s a responsibility that isn’t for everyone and should not be forced on everyone.

Alaska saw more than 100,000 new voters automatically registered since AVR went into effect in 2017, largely as “undeclared” voters—the category with the lowest election turnout. Just as uninterested voters did not take the time to register themselves, Democrats know they’re unlikely to take the initiative to opt out. Only 29,000 individuals did so. Many of these residents get registered automatically through the state’s Permanent Fund when they apply for their dividend checks. Unless the state threatens to take that away, many of them will never care about politics, and for the sake of all other Alaskans, should not face pressure to cast an uninformed ballot.

Secondly, AVR bloats voter rolls, making it harder for Secretaries of State to clean them up, whilecreating the possibility of double voting.

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 requires states to keep updated lists of registered voters to speed up ballot processing, limit double-voting, and reduce voter confusion. Arizona does not have AVR, but even there, a Restoration News analysis found over 1,300 registered voters on Arizona’s rolls born between 1902 and 1923, including 201 voters allegedly born before 1918. Flooding the voter rolls every year with AVR makes it harder for even a willing Secretary of State to maintain clean lists.

Fighting the Tsunami of Dirty Voter Rolls, State by State

In an interview,  Must Read Alaska editor Susan Downing told Restoration News, “Even though the Division of Elections cleans the voter rolls every winter, the rolls swell up again after March 31, when dividend applications are due.”

“We get a whole new batch of newly registered voters who may become targets for ballot harvesting or voter fraud efforts,” Downing said.

The nonpartisan election watchdog group Fight Voter Fraud found almost 300,000 double-registered voters across multiple states in the six years after the first states enacted AVR. Registered deceased voters or voters who have since moved out of state present an opportunity for a family member to vote in their stead, especially in states where Democrats refuse to require voter ID.

Finally, AVR makes it much easier for noncitizens to register to vote, thereby canceling out American citizens’ votes.

Left-leaning NPR admitted that even in states without AVR, noncitizens sometimes receive voter registration forms form the DMV after getting their driver’s licenses. This can also lead to under-prosecution, because, as in West Virginia, the Attorney General’s Office may show leniency to voting noncitizens who either genuinely believed or claim to have believed they were eligible to vote because the state registered them automatically or sent them a registration form.

The radical Left cynically uses AVR as a tactic to help its political machine run cheaper and smoother by inflating the voter rolls with people who have little or no interest in politics. This cynical motivation flies under the radar for most advocates of AVR. But in addition to encouraging reluctant citizens to vote who dilute the votes of citizens who actually care about public policy, it also makes it easier for illegitimate votes to be counted by swelling voter rolls with people who no longer live in a jurisdiction or are dead. The precedent of registering noncitizens to vote also presents a threat that would not easily exist if everyone who wants to cast a ballot has to take the time to register themselves.

Congress should pass a federal ban on automatic voter registration at the state level, as it disenfranchises the legitimate voting rights of American citizens in multiple ways.