In Sweden, more than 82.6% of people over 18 turn out to vote in elections.
82.6%!
In the U.S., just over half the voting age population shows up to the polls.
We’re getting our asses kicked by Denmark, South Korea, the Netherlands and a whole host
of other developed democracies.
If we re-sort this chart to show what percent of registered voters actually voted - we’re
near the top of the list!
The U.S. has a huge gap between the share of people who can vote, and the share of people
who actually do.
But it turns out, a lot of these countries are doing something really simple, that could
make that gap disappear.
If you take all 50 states, and rank them by the share of eligible voters — that’s
citizens over 18 who aren’t felons — that actually voted in 2016, you can see a huge
variation.
Now let’s look at the states that let you register when you show up to vote on election
day.
Notice something?
The states with the highest turnout rates all have it.
All the states below the national average— well, they don’t.
Most of them make you register nearly a month in advance.
And there’s a whole host of reasons people might not be registered - nearly a third
of unregistered Americans say they intend to and just haven’t gotten around to it,
others say it’s inconvenient or they just don’t know how.
In Minnesota, 12% of the people who voted in 2016 registered on election day.
That’s 350,000 people.
Maine, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Idaho all had lots of people registering last-minute,
too.
Oregon has figured that out.
Turnout increased nearly 4% from 2012 to 2016 — that's more than double than what we saw nationally.
It’s no coincidence that in 2015 Oregon became the first state to enact automatic
voter registration - or AVR.
Here’s how it works.
Anyone who has an interaction with Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles is automatically
added to the list of registered voters, called a voter roll.
The state sends them postcards giving them a chance to register with a party or decline
to be registered.
It changes the system from opt-in to opt-out.
So a sixteen year old getting their driver license will be automatically registered
to vote when they turn 18.
A new resident who changes their ID or car registration will also be automatically registered
In total, 272,000 people were registered this way.
And more than a third of them actually voted in 2016.
Of those voters, 37% of them were under 30.
Compare that to the voters who were registered through the traditional fill-out-the-vote--for
method, and only 13% were under 30.
AVR got more young people to come out on election day.
13 states and Washington, DC have already passed AVR legislation and will have it running
by the 2020 election.
It’ll have massive effects in California alone, where there are nearly 7 million eligible
people not registered to vote yet.
Let’s go back to that chart with all the other countries.
These are the ones who have some form of automatic voter registration.
If the US implemented it nationally, we could literally move up in the world.
Plus, it’ll make our voting system more secure and more accurate.
Now when you move, you have to re-register to vote.
That creates duplicate registrations and makes it harder for voter rolls to be kept updated.
With AVR, your registration moves with you - no duplicates.
It’ll also be cheaper.
Everything will be electronic and there will be millions less registrations to process.
But most importantly, it could automatically register nearly 50 million Americans, who
would then gets a chance to help decide how the country should be run.