New Pew Issue Brief Drills Down on State Implementation of Online Voter Registration

[Image courtesy of Pew]

No development in recent years has had a bigger impact on election administration than online voter registration. As more and more states make OVR available, the process by which citizens create or update their voter record is fundamentally changing.

At this stage in OVR’s expansion, however, we have reached the point where it is not only possible but desirable to look past simply IF a state has OVR and ask HOW IT WORKS.

That’s why I was so delighted to see yesterday’s release of a new Pew issue brief dedicated to online voter registration. Pew’s election team has been persistently pushing the benefits of OVR, and this latest issue brief is a helpful component of that effort in that it highlights the different components of existing state OVR systems. The idea – just as it was (Throwback Thursday alert!) with electionline’s “Assorted Rolls” report looking at statewide voter databases post-HAVA – is to spot those aspects of different systems that current and future states might want to emulate or avoid going forward.

As you can see from the table above, Pew’s inquiry was wide-ranging – and highlights the occasional outliers in the states surveyed. For example:

• + South Carolina is the only state that requires a full SSN to apply;
• + New York is the only state that cannot differentiate between new and updated records;
• + Maryland is the only state whose system resides with a vendor; and
• + Arizona and South Carolina are the only states that flag records for review as opposed to sending all records for review.

These components and others relating to usability, security and cost have already become vitally important – and illuminate how the OVR discussion is moving past “do we have it/should we get it?” to “what’s the best way to make it work?” As the number of states with some form of OVR continues to grow – indeed, half of the states or more could have it by the 2016 presidential election – these “nuts and bolts” considerations are going to be key indicators of success.

Thanks, as always, to my friends and former colleagues at Pew for this terrific resource – and for their continued quality work in this area!