The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.
Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized during oral arguments in Bush v. Gore that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. For this reason, states can determine their own voting procedures, leading to some confusing and contradictory policies.
Voter turnout in the U. S. is notoriously low compared to other countries. Only 58% percent of the electorate showed up to vote in the 2016 presidential election. It was the first time in over 50 years that Americans voted without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. Since 2010, 22 states have passed new laws making it more difficult to vote, including voter I. D. laws, limits on the use of absentee ballots, and laws that make registration more difficult. In addition, an MIT survey estimated that 12% of voters, or 16 million people, encountered a problem while trying to vote, including long lines and defective voting machines.
Their problems are just beginning. According to the Brennan Center, so far in 2017, 99 bills have been introduced in 31 states that impose new voting restrictions. The Trump Justice Department recently announced that it has no objection to an Ohio bill that purges voters from the voting rolls if they miss three consecutive elections and fail to respond to a warning mailed to their last known address. Voter suppression laws can be seen as similar to gerrymandering in that they represent attempts by legislators to select their voters, rather than the reverse.
Those who vote in U. S. elections tend to be White, older, more affluent and more highly educated than the average citizen. People of color, young people and lower-income people are underrepresented. Voter suppression laws tend to enhance these differences. Since the groups that are most likely to be disenfranchised by them are more likely to vote for Democrats, it is not surprising that almost all these laws are passed in Republican-controlled states.
An alternative would be to make it easier for citizens to vote. One of the more promising ways to accomplish this is automatic voter registration (AVR). Oregon was the first state to enact an AVR law; it went into effect in 2016. A research team headed by Sean McElwee looked at the law and its results.
Under to the Oregon AVR law, eligible voters who have contact with the Department of Motor Vehicles are sent a letter informing them that they have been automatically added to the voter rolls. They can opt out of being registered by returning a postcard (8% opted out). This postcard can also be used to register with a political party (11% chose a party). Since Oregon has closed primaries, those who didn’t register with a party couldn’t vote in the primary.
In 2016, 186,050 people were registered for the first time through the AVR law. This was 66% of the new registrants for that year. In addition, 35,000 people whose registrations had lapsed were re-registered. A total of 67,902, or 36%, of these people voted in the 2016 election. Overall voter turnout in Oregon was 68%, up from 64% in 2012, and well above the national average. The authors estimate that 2-3% of the 4% increase in voter turnout was attributable to the AVR law.
AVR also affected the demographic composition of Oregon voters. Oregon’s voting electorate was 94% White, but 11% of those added to the rolls by AVR were people of color. The chart below compares the percentages of Black, Latino and Asian voters added by AVR to the existing electorate (non-AVR voters).
Not surprisingly, AVR also reduced the average age of Oregon voters. 37% of the new AVR voters were between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to only 13% of non-AVR voters.
Finally, AVR increased the percentage of low income people who voted in 2016. As shown in the chart, the new AVR voters were more likely than existing voters to come from lower income neighborhoods, and less likely to come from affluent neighborhoods.
The Oregon AVR law is unusual when compared to the much greater number of laws that make it more difficult to vote. However, this raises an interesting issue. An opponent of AVR could argue that the Oregon law is nothing more than an attempt by Democrats to increase their chances in subsequent elections, and that laws that try to increase voter turnout are just as partisan as laws that try to suppress it. Since there is no constitutional right to vote and no uniform set of federal laws defining voting procedures, any change in a state law that affects voter turnout can be criticized as unfair by one party or the other.
Does the American public have a preference between encouraging and discouraging voting? An April 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center asked a representative sample to choose between the alternatives of requiring people to register to vote ahead of time, or doing “everything possible” to make it easy for citizens to vote. Here are the results, overall, and by political party.
Unfortunately, these two alternatives are not true opposites. Voter registration is not the only procedure that makes it more difficult for people to vote. In addition, the question doesn’t impose any limits on doing “everything possible” to make it easier to vote. (Should they send a limo to my door on election day?) It is easy to imagine that, had respondents been given some rationale for restricting access to the ballot box, such as preventing “voter fraud,” the results might have been different. Nevertheless, we can take some comfort in the fact that, in the abstract, the public views making it easier for people to vote more favorably than making it more difficult.
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