E. J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport propose 11 gateway reforms to pave the way for universal civic duty voting
For decades, Carnegie Corporation of New York has supported grantees that have developed and advocated for the policies to increase voting in the United States described by E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport in their book 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting with a foreword by Heather McGhee (The New Press, 2022). These policies, which have been tested and evaluated over the years, have come from organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice, the Common Cause Education Fund, Demos, and Human SERVE. The unprecedented voter turnout in the 2020 election, during a pandemic, saw voters use many of the methods of voting outlined in the following excerpt from 100% Democracy, allowing them to vote safely and make their voices heard. – Geri Mannion, Managing Director, Strengthening U.S. Democracy Program, Carnegie Corporation of New York
Universal civic duty voting is a logical leap forward from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and it would provide much — needed protections to the right to vote. Our proposal is designed to vindicate the liberating purposes of the 1965 law and the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. When the United States Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, it unleashed a new wave of voter suppression, rolling back advances once thought secure. A vibrant democracy movement, in turn, pushed back against the vote suppressors and worked actively for reforms that would increase participation.
A demand for universal civic duty voting is also a demand for such reforms, which would put an end to the cycles of inclusion and exclusion that have been part of our nation’s story from the beginning. As our polling has shown, many Americans worry that civic duty voting will not work unless it is implemented along with other changes to our system. We agree. A range of gateway reforms is inextricably linked to the successful introduction of universal participation.
The example of Australia is instructive: that country’s system works well because the requirement to vote works in tandem with a range of voter-friendly policies. Election day is conveniently scheduled on a Saturday, for example. Registration and access to the ballot are made easy, and election officials are required to make energetic, affirmative outreach efforts to ensure that citizens are registered. Voting opportunities, including mail-in voting, early voting, and numerous polling places, are extensive. Because everyone must vote, the practice of intimidating people at polling places so they won’t vote is nonexistent. And the country’s system of election administration is nonpartisan and professional, reducing the opportunities and temptations to tilt rules and practices in favor of one side.
The reforms we propose build on the work of the voting rights and democracy movements, and they should be promoted by federal law. Gateway reforms fall into three categories: expanding opportunities to register, increasing the options for voting, and strengthening effective election administration.
1. Same-Day Voter Registration
Historically, the requirement to register in advance of voting was enacted as an intentional hurdle to participation, targeting the influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries while also preventing the extension of the right to vote for Black Americans. It has also for years been standard practice to rationalize deadlines cutting off registration well before election day as necessary to give election officials time to create accurate lists of eligible voters.
But technological advances and the digitization of voting rolls make this rationale for advanced registration anachronistic. Same-day registration encourages new voters to enter the process, and also allows existing voters to update or correct errors in their registrations. The procedure, first adopted in the mid-1970s in Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, has consistently led to significant increases in voter participation, without any major problems of implementation. The number of states that offer same-day registration has grown dramatically. In 2020, 21 states and the District of Columbia offered people the opportunity to use it, and it made a difference; consistent with earlier studies, states with same-day registration had turnout rates 5 percent higher than states without it.
2. Automatic Voter Registration
Twenty states and the District of Columbia have adopted policies that automatically register citizens to vote and update an existing voter registration whenever a citizen interacts with the state Department of Motor Vehicles and, in some jurisdictions, other governmental or social service agencies that collect citizenship information. Citizens typically are given the opportunity to opt out of registering, rather than being required to opt in. Oregon was the first state to move away from the opt-in model when the state implemented automatic registration in 2016. In that year alone, more than 225,000 residents were automatically registered through Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The process, still relatively new, has rapidly expanded. In cases where ineligible voters (such as noncitizens) are mistakenly added to the rolls, states should enact “safe harbor” provisions to protect those added to the rolls by mistake. California and Vermont have such provisions to protect noncitizens in the small number of cases where this has taken place. Since immigration is a federal responsibility, Congress should enact national protections along these lines as well.
3. Restoring the Right to Vote for Citizens with Felony Convictions
Nearly all states, thanks to significant progress achieved over the last decade, now allow citizens with felony convictions to have their voting rights restored after completion of their sentence. However, the policies concerning the way that probation, parole, and the payment of fines and fees are handled vary considerably across states, as the Florida battle showed. Entirely decoupling people’s right to vote from their incarceration status — as Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., have done — would be a major step forward. At a minimum, a uniform standard that provides full restoration of voting rights after a person’s release from prison would remove this functionally and historically racist barrier to voting.
4. Online Registration
Forty states and the District of Columbia now allow people to register online. This cost-saving measure, first implemented in Arizona in 2002, has eased voting registration for many. The COVID-19 pandemic gave additional impetus for online registration, as options for in-person registration narrowed in 2020.
5. Preregistration of 16- and 17-Year-Olds
Twenty-three states now allow eligible young people to preregister before they are 18 years old. Their names are then automatically placed on the electoral rolls upon their 18th birthday. Preregistration allows schools the opportunity to engage and educate students in civics and voting in high school before they disperse to the workforce or to college. Some studies have shown that this early registration makes it more likely that young people will become voters when they reach voting age.
States have also made significant progress since the days when voting was largely restricted to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — a vestige of a federal law enacted in 1845 based on the needs of farmers in what was then a heavily agricultural nation. The election of 2020, in which an astonishing 111 million people voted by means other than in person on that second Tuesday, shows just how far we have come from that anachronistic concept of voting.
6. Early Voting
Forty-three states and the District of Columbia now allow people to vote before election day. A 2020 study on the impact of early voting in Ohio by the American Economic Journal found “substantial positive impacts of early voting on turnout, equal to 0.22 percentage points of additional turnout per additional early voting day.” In the 2020 election, 25 percent of voters cast their votes early in person.
The number of days that early voting is permitted and how convenient the process is made vary greatly between states. For example, early voting in Florida must begin at least 10 days before an election, while Virginia enacted a law in the 2020 legislative session allowing 45 days of early voting. Expanded early voting was also one of the successful adaptations made during the COVID-19 crisis. Federal policies to require states to offer at least 15 days of early voting would be an important step in the right direction.
7. Vote by Mail
Expanding mail-in voting was a central focus of efforts to allow people to vote safely in the 2020 elections. In addition, many states sent ballot applications, or ballots themselves, to every voter in their jurisdictions. Although most states initially made the expansions applicable only for the pandemic year, a number of states have moved to make the expansion permanent. Sixteen states, either by legislation or in their state constitutions, still require voters to provide an excuse in order to vote by absentee. They should join the other 29 states and the District of Columbia in the move toward no-excuse absentee voting. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — have gone beyond no-excuse absentee ballots by sending ballots to all or almost all eligible voters. California did the same for the 2020 election, as did Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. The results of the mail voting expansion were dramatic. Forty-five percent of all voters voted by mail. While all states had increases in turnout compared to 2016, the states that had full or close-to-full voting by mail had a 9 percent increase in turnout, compared to a 5 percent increase in states that did not do so. Expanded mail-in voting should clearly be a permanent part of our election process.
8. Flexible Election Day Options
During the pandemic, many states invested in innovative efforts to make polling places safe. These efforts would be equally useful in a nation free of COVID-19. Curbside voting is one example: poll workers took ballots or portable machines to voters’ cars, eliminating the need to stand in line. Some jurisdictions used mobile voting centers. The use of drop boxes grew dramatically, for both early and election day voting. It also seems obvious that the successes during the pandemic in recruiting and training a new generation of election workers should be replicated in calmer times. Widely available early voting also improves the experience for election day voters by reducing the number of voters who need to use a single polling place. The shortened lines and wait times achieved in 2020 should be the goal for every election.
9. Convenient Placement of Accessible Precincts and Vote Centers
The success of universal voting will also depend on the convenient placement of polling places and the effective use of vote centers. This can be especially important for rural and Indigenous voters who often need to travel long distances to cast a ballot — particularly in tribal lands, where access is now often severely limited. Quantity matters: all jurisdictions should place precincts and vote centers in enough places to ensure ease of voting for all citizens.
Voters with disabilities can have their right to vote impaired when voting sites lack wheelchair accessibility or present other physical challenges All voting centers should meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and allow people with disabilities maximum access and privacy in their voting process. Colorado currently conducts and releases audits that detail counties’ compliance with federal accessibility standards in their polling places after each election, and the rest of the country should follow suit.
All these reforms make sense with or without universal civic duty voting. But a system that would require everyone to vote must do all it can to remove obstacles to citizens carrying out their responsibilities.
Even good election policies can be undermined if election administration does not inspire confidence among voters that their participation is valued and that their votes will count. Election administration had not been a topic that made anyone’s heart beat faster, yet one heartening result of the 2020 pandemic election was the transformation of many election officials into national heroes. Like other essential workers — for essential they were — they deserved the acclaim. The honor we accorded them should inspire far more interest in the measures we need to take to administer elections professionally and effectively, another essential step toward universal civic duty voting. Laws in some states to undercut the nonpartisan administration of elections must be challenged both through federal legislation and in the courts. Election subversion has become as significant a threat to voting rights as voter suppression.
10. Maintenance of Voting Lists
Every jurisdiction must maintain accurate and up-to-date voting lists. Even with civic duty voting in place, it will be necessary to guard against overly aggressive purging policies, which often remove eligible voters from the electoral rolls. Aggressive purges have resulted in major legal battles in a number of states, as recounted earlier. States should carefully follow the list management procedures specified in the National Voter Registration Act and engage in careful cross-state cooperation through the Electronic Registration Information Center.
11. Adequate Funding of Election Administration
The funding of elections became a major issue during the COVID-19 crisis, and substantial federal support on an ongoing basis will be required to make voting accessible to all citizens. Elections are typically an afterthought in local budgeting. This must change. Together, all levels of government must come to see investments in the election process as critical investments in democracy itself.
The registration and voting reforms advanced by organizers, advocates, and forward-looking election officials are encouraging and important. They have had real effects on turnout. Expanded voting opportunities in blue, red, and purple states are positive steps toward increased participation. Embracing and building on these achievements — and, yes, resisting efforts to roll them back — will improve American democracy now, and give universal civic duty voting its best opportunity to succeed.
E. J. Dionne Jr. is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, University Professor at Georgetown University, and visiting professor at Harvard University.
Miles Rapoport is executive director of 100% Democracy: An Initiative for Universal Voting and the senior practice fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He formerly served in the Connecticut state legislature and as secretary of the state. He is a past president of Demos and of Common Cause.
This excerpt originally appeared in 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting by E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport. Copyright © 2022 by E. J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport. Foreword © 2022 by Heather McGhee. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. Carnegie Corporation of New York funded some of the research that led to the publication of the book.
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