Can Missing Voters Be Found with Automatic Voter Registration?

This time next year, the election of 2016 will be over and America will have chosen its next president.

But how many Americans will have actually participated in making this decision?

In the 2012 presidential election, 1.3 million votes decided the winner in the ten states with the closest margins of victory. But nearly 20 million eligible citizens in those states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, are missing from the voter rolls.

Overall, these “missing voters” amount to half, and in some cases more than half, of the total votes cast for president in these states. This should ring huge alarm bells for those who care about our society’s health and future.

Fortunately, there is a solution. In a forthcoming paper, Demos predicts that if those states adopt Automatic Voter Registration, they would add 6.8 million eligible citizens to their voter rolls. That means that the number of potential voters added through automatic voter registration in the previously-mentioned ten states would be more than five times the number of voters that decided the 2012 races in these states.

These “missing voters” would finally be in a position to have their voices heard.

Of course, not everyone who is registered will always vote. People may not have time off from work (particularly in states without early voting or with restricted hours for early voting), or may not think their vote matters because of the huge influence of big money in our government. But in a recent study of 18-29 year old non-voters, 55% of Black youth, 45% of Latino youth, and 61% of White youth said they didn’t vote because they were “not registered to vote,” by far the highest reason given. Automatic voter registration can transform voter registration from a barrier into a gateway to participation.

CLICK HERE to read Liz Kennedy's 2016’s “Missing Voters” Can Be Found with Automatic Voter Registration on Demos's Policy Shop.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker