The days of filling out a form and using snail mail to register to vote are just about over.
Voters now can register to vote online in 31 states. Another seven have passed legislation to do so and are establishing their systems. More are expected to follow.
States have done it for economic reasons — going paperless is that much cheaper — as well as to keep up with the digital world.
It may have an additional benefit: reducing the tension around voter access issues, such as voter ID laws. Online databases make it vastly easier for states to ensure the accuracy of their voter rolls.
“Online registration has been a real boon in terms of keeping the voter roles clean,” said Wendy Underhill, program director for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
She cautions that the trend toward online registration isn’t itself going to make the debate over voter ID laws moot. The technological issues related to online voting are more complicated than merely registering, and no state is even close to experimenting with it.
So voters still will have to cast their Election Day ballots in person at official sites for the foreseeable future. Whatever identification they will be required to provide also will continue to be a matter of contention.
But online registration addresses some of the underlying issues related to voter ID laws. Cleaning up the state databases has reduced the need for provisional ballots, Underhill notes, one of the main tools for dealing with cases in which voters cannot provide identification.
Additional innovations in registration may have the same effect. Pennsylvania and Kentucky expanded online voter profiles to include photos of signatures, which would allow for easier verification.
As recently as 2002, online registration did not even exist. The trend began that year with Arizona, which adapted its state motor vehicles department website to allow it. Six years later, Washington state followed. The trend accelerated in 2011, with 21 states acting to allow it since then.
It is a bipartisan trend, too: The change has been adopted in states as liberal as California and as conservative as Alabama.
“There isn’t really any organized opposition,” Underhill said, adding that some states have been more proactive than others.
A driving factor is the cost savings from eliminating paperwork. A 2015 Pew Center survey found that the digital process reduced the costs to the state from an average of $2.34 per registrant to just 50 cents. California said it saved $2 million in the year after it allowed online registration.
It has been an entirely state-driven movement, though some did use funds repurposed from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which Congress passed to help states update their voting machines.
While the exact mechanism varies from state to state, in most cases online registration is effectively an extension of the state’s driver’s licensing system and requires similar identification. Applications are immediately reviewed electronically, and potential issues are flagged to be examined by a human registrar. In all states, voters can still do a traditional paper registration if they do not have Internet access.
A 2015 Pew Charitable Trusts study found that security hasn’t been an issue: “Studies consistently show that online voter registration systems effectively protect voters’ private information. All states employ safeguards meant to thwart cyberattacks, and to date, no state has reported a security breach.”
