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# 									Voter Registration in U.S. Elections							

FPC Briefing

Christopher Mann, Professor of Political Science, Skidmore College and Research Director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research

Thursday, May 30, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET

Washington, D.C.

May 30, 2024

## 								Summary							

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This briefing exploresvoter registration in America.The first step in taking part in American democracy is registering to vote. In America’s federalist system, each stateis responsible forits own voter registration system,within parameters set by federal law for federal elections. This briefing exploressimilarities and differences in voter registration procedures across states,how statesmaintainthese voter registration rolls over time, debates about access, accuracy, and security of voter rolls, how election officials make registration accessibleandensure only those who qualify are properly registered, and how civic and political organizations encourage voter registration.
   

**THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.**

**MODERATOR:**  Hello and good morning, everyone.  Welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center’s latest briefing on the U.S. election process.  My name is Jake Goshert.  I’m the moderator for the briefing this morning.  As a I reminder, the briefing is on the record, and we will post a transcript and a video of the briefing following the session today.  It’ll be on our website, fpc.state.gov.  For all the journalists joining us on Zoom, please take a moment now to rename yourself with your name and your outlet and your country so we know who is joining us.  

Our briefer today is Dr.  Christopher Mann, professor of Political Science at Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York, who is also serving as the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research.  Before Dr. Mann’s opening remarks, one quick reminder.  He is here as an independent subject matter expert, and the views expressed by briefers not affiliated with the Department of State are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the department or the U.S. Government.  Their participation in Foreign Press Center programming does not imply endorsement, approval, or recommendation of their views.  They are here as subject matter experts.  

So with that introduction, I’m going to hand it over to Dr. Mann to speak to us today about the voter registration in the U.S. election process.  Dr. Mann.  

**MR MANN:**Thank you, Jake, and thanks to all of you who have joined us for the briefing today.  I’m going go quickly here.  I have some slides to run through to cover some of the fundamentals and hopefully answer some of the questions that were posed in advance, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A.  So I’m going to share my screen quite quickly.

As Jake said, I have a dual role at the moment.  I’m working for a nonprofit organization as well as my academic affiliation.  The Center for Election Innovation and Research works with election officials on research to identify best practices to support well-run elections so that they are something that the public can trust.  This time of year, we also work extensively with journalists to help the public understand, help you all cover elections.  So please feel free to reach out at any time through the election cycle.  

A quick roadmap of what I’m going to go through today.  I’m going to start by talking about voter registration as a state function here in the United States but also touch on some of the national guidelines.  I’m going to give you a super quick tour of some of the major moments in – that will help you understand U.S. voter registration, talk about the different ways in which people register here.  I will talk about some of the main features that are in the news in current controversies.  And I’m going to touch briefly – another part of my work over the years has been working with civic organizations on voter registration efforts, so outside of the governmental process.

So one of the key things to understand about voter registration in the United States is that it is a profound reflection of federalism.  The registration process is administered by state.  There is no national role in the voter registration process.  The national government plays no direct role at all, and therefore the process varies by state.  I’m going to talk about several of these policies, but just quickly, there’s a whole bunch of ways in which registration varies from state to state.  

The other thing you should know about this that is distinct from many other countries is that in the United States the voter registration process is largely distinct from other government processes.  I’m going to talk about automatic voter registration, which is a relatively new way in which they have been linked.  But that is a decision that was made by policymakers across all of the states to keep registration separate from other government processes.  

And we’ll also talk about some of the national legislation and, in a couple of cases, constitutional provisions that guide aspects of registration that apply to what we call federal elections, national elections here in the U.S.  And one of the messier parts that I’m not going to talk about too much but we – I’m happy to address in Q&A is the fact that these national pieces of legislation apply to federal elections or registering for federal elections.  States can, in principle, have separate requirements for state and local elections, and I’ll talk about one exception around the question of noncitizens voting.  But by and large, they run the same system and use it for all types of elections from the very most local all the way up to elections for president.  

So very quickly, the first milestone is in the wake of the United States Civil War.  The 15th Amendment adds to the Constitution a provision that does not allow discrimination in voter registration or access to voting on account of race.  Move forward to 1920, the 19th Amendment addresses gender and sex, extending the right to vote to women.  This is an interesting example where most of the states had already extended the franchise to women, although not quite all states.  So when this was passed, it was the federal government following states, not leading the states.  

The next big moment is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  And if you follow U.S. elections today, you will hear references to this frequently, usually around the question of congressional or state districting and gerrymandering, but the core of the original bill was actually around discrimination and voter registration and voting.  It takes a number of steps, specifically around voter registration to ban literacy tests, requirements that people be able to read a passage, and that was a very subjective judgement by voter registration officials; grandfather clauses, which said you could only register if your grandfather had registered; poll taxes, and other tactics that were used in a discriminatory way.  So those were all outlawed in 1965, almost a hundred years after the 15th Amendment in theory did that.  And in many ways, this was just the enforcement of that.  It also crucially provides some provisions for supervision and enforcement.  

Another related piece and very much the same Civil Rights period was the 24th Amendment, which specifically bans poll taxes.  The cartoon on the right here is from Dr. Suess, who is famous as a children’s author in the United States, but before he became famous as a children’s author, he had a career as a political cartoonist.  And one of the things that I’d like to point out here is that this cartoon does not highlight people of color.  So poor whites were also massively disenfranchised by the poll tax.  So it was economic discrimination as well.  I’ll also note that just last week, in a very timely piece of research, some academic research about the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights period in the 1960s looking at what of the discriminatory policies that were used had the most impact, and it was in fact the poll tax, followed by felony disenfranchisement that I’m going to talk about in a minute.  

The next milestone is something called the National Voter Registration Act passed in 1993.  It has a couple of key requirements around voter registration.  So it’s often referred to as the motor voter law.  And so this is one of the links – one of the rare links – between registration and government activity.  So it requires that at all driver’s license bureaus, which are run by the states – again, a federal system; there is no national driver’s license – so when people go to their state to get their driver’s license, they have to be offered the opportunity to register, but it is still a separate process.  Compliance with this law is problematic.  Happy to talk about that.  That’s – I’ve done some research on that.  

It also requires states to offer voter registration at social service agencies, military recruiting, and a variety of other agencies.  But, again, using those social services or joining the military does not automatically register you to vote.  You are simply required to be given the opportunity to participate in a separate process.  

Another step in here is that it requires all states to accept mailed voter registration forms, and it sets the maximum amount of time before Election Day when voters can be required to register at 30 days.  So prior to 1993, sometimes those requirements were many months in advance.  And since many voters don’t pay attention until close to Election Day, they would then not be able to vote.  

The last big provision of this – and I’m spending a little more time on this one because it is the big piece of federal legislation – is that there’s a set of regulations about what states can do about removing voter registration records from the roles.  So this is part of the current controversy.  And so the key provisions there – there’s some nuance to it, which I’m happy to talk about – is that records – and I’m being careful here to say records and not people – records have to stay on the voter rolls until there is no recorded vote by a person for two consecutive federal elections.  And the states are required or local election officials are required to also mail notifications to the address.  

The last piece you should know about is legislation in 2002, which was passed in the wake of the controversial presidential election in 2000.  It’s largely about voting and the problems that were seen in Florida and elsewhere, but it has a key requirement, which is that for the first time states are required to have a computerized state-wide voter registration database.  And one of the issues that we talk about today is that the federal government funded the creation of those databases but has not provided funding for infrastructure to update and upgrade those, although there is a bill under consideration in Congress at the moment.  

I’m going to quickly talk about – and again happy to go into more depth in the Q&A – about multiple different ways you can register to vote in the United States.  So you can appear at the election office.  You can appear at the agencies that I just talked about that are designated by the National Voter Registration Act.  You can submit a form that is mailed in.  There are some states – and I’ll show you a map of those states – that’ll allow you to show up and vote and – to register and vote on the same day, so we call that either same-day registration when it occurs before Election Day or Election Day registration when you can do it on Election Day.  There’s an increasing number of states that allow voters to register online through an online portal.  And then I will talk about what is known as automatic voter registration, which is related to this idea of registering when you get your driver’s license, and I’ll talk about that momentarily.  

So there – despite – so the maximum distance before the election that you – that states can require voter registration is 30 days, but this various considerably across the country.  I’m not going to spend time on these maps because you’ll have access to the recording, but this map gives you a sense of that variation – the darker colors are the longer voter registration periods.  

This map from the National Conference of State Legislatures shows you the states that allow people to register and vote on the same day.  North Carolina there in blue is the only state that does not allow you to do it on Election Day, but they do allow you – do allow citizens to register and vote during their early-voting period on the same day.  They refer to that as one-stop voting in North Carolina, which is a very nice little title to it.  

This map is largely filled in from Movement Advancement Project.  Eighty-nine percent of the population, 43 of the states plus D.C., allow people to register to vote online.  I do want to say if you go look at these sites, they vary considerably in how easy they are to use.  Some of them are quite good technology, and others not so much good technology. 

Oops, skipped over.  Automatic voter registration is a process where – we’ve seen this added in a number of states now.  We’re just over half of the total population.  There are two different versions – I’m happy to describe them –  but the dark green and the lighter green versus the yellow.  But this basically means that instead of a separate process when one goes to the DMV or, in a couple of new states, some other government agencies, it is one integrated process.  That integration is as far as the voter sees.  It actually means that the data is processed separately by the agencies, but this is seen as a way to remove the burden of voter registration from the voter, which is where it lies outside of automatic voter registration, to the government to make sure that this is processed. 

So we talked a little on some of the big things that are in the news.  One of the ways in which people who study voter registration, people in the field and advocacy organizations, often talk about the debate as being between access versus accuracy.  A lot of the partisan rhetoric and policy debate rhetoric is framed as policies being either/or – either favoring access, maybe at the expense of accuracy or without doing anything for accuracy; or accuracy but not access.  

The truth is about many of these policies that they are more like “yes, and” – that is they improve both access for voters and the accuracy of the rolls.  And you can see on the slide here, I give definitions, but access is generally the idea of policies that have a goal of ensuring that all eligible voters are registered and therefore focusing on reducing burdens and obstacles, whereas accuracy is the idea of focusing on only eligible voters being registered, and therefore the focus is on things like updating and maintaining voter rolls. 

I’m going to – so maintenance of voter rolls is something that’s been in the news.  All states actively maintain voter files.  They do largely the same things, many of them dictated by requirements of the National Voter Registration Act, but some of them best practices shared across the states.  The goal is to identify people who have moved, deceased, other changes, such as name changes – people who change their name due to marriage or divorce or other reasons.  And so these are actively maintained on a regular schedule by every state.  

There are some cooperatives among the states.  The biggest one is the Electronic Registration Information Center, which has been in the news over the last year or so that are ways that states share information, for example about people moving from one state to another, or taking advantage of scale to make them more efficient in dealing with things like trying to identify deceased records.  I’m happy to talk about the ERIC, Electronic Registration Information Center in the Q&A, but that’s a tangent that could take a while. 

Another piece that is in the news a lot these days are what are known as third-party voter registration challenges.  This is where states allow individuals to raise questions about whether someone is legitimately registered, for example saying that someone has moved, doesn’t live at an address anymore.  What I want to highlight about this is because of the first piece, because of the active voter registration maintenance by the states, the primary effect of this is disrupting election administration by making election officials spend time addressing these, because they’re often sent – especially in the last year, couple of years – a long list of voters who are being challenged, and it turns out that those people have either already been removed from the rolls, are in the process of being removed from the rolls, within compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.  And so this is something that is of great concern to election officials about the distraction and amount of resources that have to be spent on it.

Another – and this was a question that was asked in advance – is about cyber security, so preventing foreign actors, non-state malicious actors that are attempting to access voter registration databases to disrupt election administration and/or undermine public confidence.  So I’ve been in this space for more than 20 years.  It used to be that this was not something that election officials worry about.  Now it is one of their primary concerns.  There is federal support, so the states have – can work in partnership with cyber security folks at the Department of Homeland Security at the federal level.  Many of them also work with the National Guard.  So the National Guard in the United States is – think of them as reserve troops.  They are reserve troops, but they are controlled by the state, unless they’re called up by the President in a national emergency, but they act – they’re part of the state government, but they have access to everything the Department of Defense uses for cyber security.  And so they are supporting election officials, providing cyber security in the vast majority of states at this point to identify and prevent those kinds of cyber security threats. 

Another question that was asked in advance was about felons.  So in 48 states – the exceptions are Maine, Vermont, and D.C., and the other, District of Colombia – in 48 states, people convicted of a felony lose their right to vote while they’re serving their sentence, and then there’s variation about the restoration of voting rights after completing that sentence.  So 23 states automatically restore at the end of being incarcerated; 15 states restore at the end of any parole or probation at the end of a sentence, and there are 10 states that require additional steps.  Again, I’m happy to talk more about this in the Q&A, if folks want to go into more depth.  

Another concern that’s been in the news quite a bit – because the Republicans in the House of Representatives have been pursuing a bill around this – is the question of noncitizens voting.  Noncitizens are already banned under existing federal law from voting in any federal election.  There are some cases where they are allowed to vote in some local elections in some jurisdictions, but only in local elections, so things like school board or city council.  That is allowed by local law, and that is a rare case where states and localities are maintaining essentially separate voter registration processes that would allow noncitizens.  And in all cases, these noncitizens are people who are legal residents here as on their way to citizenship with a green card or with work visas or other legal status.

So when we hear about this, the congressional debates are largely duplicative.  They would have no change in the law.  You also have some state ballot measures and some state legislation.  That would have more meaningful impact by preventing localities from allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections like school boards, but it is mostly symbolic signaling and motivating people to vote.  

The last thing I’ll say very quickly here is to talk briefly about some of the things that are done by third parties – so by third party here I mean civic organizations, political campaigns – in order to register to people – register people to vote.  So as I said earlier, the burden of voter registration lies on the voter in the United States, not on the government, so people have to act.  So civic organizations, political organizations go door to door.  They do what’s called tabling, sitting at events, fairs.  Sometimes you’ll see them outside of shopping centers.  They will also – whoops, sorry, wrong direction – mail people voter registration forms or encourage them to go online – this is an example of what those letters might look like – and encourage people to return it.  And then of course, there are digital ads because we have online voter registration and they’re encouraging people to click through to register to vote.  Happy – I’ve done a lot of research in this area.  Happy to talk about, but again want to be brief and respond to what is of interest to you all.

The last thing I’ll say about this is understanding these efforts.  No matter who is doing it, the goal is always the same, which is to shift the composition of the electorate to some advantage.  That might be partisan, so the Biden campaign will register people who they think will vote for Joe Biden; the Trump campaign will register people who they think will vote for Donald Trump.  It may be ideological, so left or right, separate from the parties.  It might be around a particular issue, so we see a lot of activity these days from abortion-related groups on both the pro-choice and pro-life sides trying to register their voters because there may be ballot measures around that.  We see that around a number of other issues historically as well.  

It may also simply be demographic, so efforts to register young people so that their voices are more heard; efforts to vote – to register, for example, African Americans who have historically been under-represented in the electorate, other groups.  Sometimes it is simply kind of regional as well – efforts to make sure that rural votes are represented, city votes are represented, those kinds of things.  Different organizations, but they’re always looking for some sort of advantage.

All right.  Hopefully I have kept your attention, and I will stop talking at you and answer your questions.  

**MODERATOR:**  Great.  Thank you, Dr. Mann.  That was really interesting.  I always learn.  Even though I’ve been voting for many years, I’ve always been learning things during these briefings.  

So we have a few questions.  Again, journalists, if you have a question, please raise your digital hand.  Before you do that, make sure you change your name in Zoom to your name and outlet and country.  We’ll start with Pearl.  Pearl, I see your hand up first.  If you could unmute yourself and ask your question.  

**QUESTION:**  Thank you so much, Jake.  Thank you for the presentation.  My question is actually in two parts.  The first part is:  Can you talk about any instances, recent or past or any that you may foresee in this coming election, which may raise questions that are directly or related to issues of being this process, this voter registration process, being seen as free, fair, or credible?

And then the second part of my question is:  Are there instances in these states or local elections where external election observers are invited to observe the process to see whether it is free, fair, or credible?  Thanks.

**MR MANN:**  Yeah, let me take the second question first, because it’s a little bit easier and more straightforward.  International election observers are welcome.  I don’t know the exact number of states, but it’s the overwhelming majority.  I could tell you here in New York State actually because it’s where I teach there are provisions in state law for international observers, but I couldn’t get my students in as observers, so there are not provisions for domestic observers, but there were provisions for international observers.  Again, it is a federal system so those things vary over time.  But there has been increasing interest in most – I never say “all” when it comes to elections, because there’s always at least one or two exceptions.  But observers are allowed in.

In terms of the controversies about this, right, one of the reasons that I touched on the history is the perceptions that voter registration is free and fair – this has been a very contested space historically.  And that leaves a legacy in a lot of people’s perceptions about whether there is fairness and full freedom of everyone to register, questions of equality and discrimination.  Those questions are very real for significant portions of the American public, and I don’t think this election will be any different.

And of course, there are groups that seek to highlight that for one reason or another, sometimes in ways of saying we should – as part of the continuing Civil Rights struggle, we are making progress but not there yet and we want to continue that fight, and that is often a motivating strategy.  There are others that use it in more negative, discouraging sorts of ways.  But it will continue to be a contested space.

The credibility issue, I think, is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about these days in my role at the Center for Election Innovation and Research.  I mentioned cyber security in particular.  There is a considerable threat across all of the practitioners in this space.  I talk to state and local election officials about – specifically about the idea either, in fact or the perception, that voter registration databases could be attacked and manipulated.  There are questions about policies – because it varies across the states – about whether those are fair, whether they’re manipulated to partisan advantage in particular.  So this is very much a contested space.  It’s something that election officials spend a lot of time thinking about how to address mis- and disinformation in this space that may undermine that credibility, as well as very real threats.  

I didn’t give you specific examples.  So if you have specific questions, I’m happy to deal with those, or if they come up as we go through this election cycle.  I – we have not seen anything in 2024 that comes to mind (inaudible) —

**MODERATOR:**  All right.  I think – did we lose Dr. Mann?  No, he’s back, I think.  

**MR MANN:**  Oh, yeah, sorry.  Yikes.  Had a little panic attack there.

**MODERATOR:**  No problem.  So we’ll move on to the next question.  We have Jahanzaib, if you can unmute yourself and introduce yourself and ask your question.  

**QUESTION:**  Thank you.  Thank you for doing this.  This is Jahanzaib Ali from ARY News TV Pakistan.  So my question is about the allegations of voting fraud.  Still a former president and his supporters are claiming that there are chances – and they’re expecting, like, fraud in voting, especially the voting mails.  And so do you really think that – is it possible the system of this country, of the voting – is it possible that this can be, like, rigging, or like fraud?  Because we have seen these kind of allegations, like, in the last presidential elections too.  And what kind of – second question is that – regarding this, that given these allegations of voter fraud, what specific steps were being taken to investigate the claims in the last presidential elections?  Thank you.

**MR MANN:**  So let me start by saying any evidence – all the evidence points to voter registration being exceptionally rare.  One of the pieces of research that I assign to my students indicates that sightings of alien abduction are as frequent as evidence of voter fraud in the United States, so exceptionally rare.  That is not to say that it – there are zero, and I should not be quite so flippant as to compare voter fraud to alien abduction, because there are certainly examples where there have been attempts of fraud that have been caught.  But they are exceptionally rare.  Even as close as our presidential elections have been, there is nowhere near enough fraud that has ever been identified and attempted to be prosecuted or successfully prosecuted.  We’re talking about single digit votes, maybe double digits votes.  The system is very robust to identifying and preventing any of these types of situations.  So lots of redundancy built into the system in terms of verification of voter identity and those sorts of things.

Jake, I just want to confirm that I haven’t frozen on you.

**MODERATOR:**  Nope, you’re still good with me.

**MR MANN:**  Okay, good.  The – so for example, right, in voter registration, identity is checked when people register to vote.  It is read  – checked every time people obtain a ballot.  It is – the voter registration systems are checked and re-checked.  I talked about states have internal checks on fraud being committed, changes in their voter registration databases, often working with some of the leading tech providers, looking for things like hacks, as well as the Department of Homeland Security providing support, the National Guard providing support.  

All of those things are looking for anomalies in the system.  When it comes to voter registration equipment, one of the strengths of the system – so I talk a lot about federalism with a sort of negative tone of it means there are differences across – in order to manipulate any election, it’s not just one system you have to rig, if we had one national voter registration system or one voting system across the country – but the rules are all different; the technology is all different.  One thing they have – all of the technology that is used, none of it is connected to the internet, so it’s very difficult to hack or rig from a distance, which means not only is election – not only are elections federalized across 50 states; there are 10,000 separate local election officials who run elections in counties or cities across the United States.  So you would have to rig some significant portion of 10,000 election systems in order to rig an election.  That is very hard to do.  This is not like hacking into a single database and changing things.  It is a massively decentralized system which makes any kind of attack or attempt to rig from the inside exceptionally hard.  

So I could go on and on down this line.  I will also say that a big challenge here is mis- and disinformation about this.  You mentioned the rhetoric from leading candidates.  There is also mis- and disinformation online, on social media in particular, that is problematic about creating a perception that the system is rigged or unfair.  There are a lot of efforts to combat that misinformation as well and correct it.  It is a Sisyphean task in the sense that it sort of never ends; you address one piece of misinformation, it comes from a different direction in a slightly different way.  But it is – I mentioned that election officials, they used to just focus on how to run elections; they now have to be cyber security experts.  They also have to be mis- and disinformation experts.  The responsibilities that fall on the people who run elections in the United States has grown tremendously, and that is one area in which they are working hard to get better at it.

**MODERATOR:**  Okay.  So again, journalists, if you have a question, please push the raised hand icon and we can call on you.  We’re going to move to Ethiopia, and hopefully I can pronounce the name correctly.  Tibebesilasse, if you can unmute yourself and introduce yourself and ask your question.

**QUESTION:**  Thank you very much.  Thank you for your briefing, Doctor.  This is Tibebesilasse from Ethiopia, Africa, east Africa.  My question is eligible or American citizens who also are living in abroad – how can they register to vote?  In this time, how can manage the credibility issue?  Thank you very much.

**MR MANN:**  That is the big question, and I think the answer is both simple and incredibly difficult.  In terms – the simple answer is communicating as much as possible about all of the things that are done to keep elections secure.  It is incredibly difficult, as I said, because that is a little bit like trying to hold back a river, because the accusations change from day to day when one piece is successfully rebutted.  

It is an incredibly complicated system, and so there are a lot of places where doubts can be raised.  And while I find elections fascinating and I think about them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and have done so for two decades, most Americans tune into elections only every two years, some – many of them only every four years for the presidential election.  And the system, which seems complicated, can seem problematic.  Why does it have to be so complicated?

One of the really interesting thing is that when we look at public opinion and credibility and trust in elections, is that people have a great deal of trust in the election they experience directly; that is, they have very high levels of trust in their local elections, where they vote, where their friends and neighbors vote.  

When you ask them about trust, then, in elections as you move away in larger and larger jurisdictions, so from their voting experience to their cities and then to their state and then nationally, we see levels of trust decline.  

And one of the things that I think and I hope you will see a lot more of is election officials trying to highlight the elections in the United States.  I have talked about 50 states, I’ve talked about 10,000 localities, but the truth is that elections are run by hundreds of thousands of friends and neighbors.  Elections are largely run by people who are temporary workers, many of them volunteers or paid minimally who go and staff the polling places, and they are the primary people who are administering elections in that way.  

And so people generally have trust in their friends and neighbors, and highlighting that and reminding the American public of that seems to go a long way towards reminding people that these are not some abstract, distant set of people, but in fact friends and neighbors across the country administering the election.

**MODERATOR:**  Okay.  We’ll go back to Pearl.  Pearl, if you could unmute yourself and ask your question, introduce yourself and ask your question.  Pearl.

**QUESTION:**  Hi.  Of course, it’s Pearl again.  If I can indulge you on another – additional question.  Since we’ve been talking about misinformation, disinformation, right, and I know that today’s focus is in fact voter registration, but you can’t successfully do voter registration without voter education.  So what I wanted to find out from you is across these thousands of electoral jurisdictions, is there – have these state or have these election systems got a basic agreement or understanding as to what is the minimum voter education on voter registration should be?  Where can we find this information?  And is it easy to access voter registration data across these jurisdictions?

**MR MANN:**  Boy, I wish I had a more positive answer than I’m going to give you.  This is one of the challenges and one of the things that has changed.  So I’ve been working in this space since right around 2000.  Like many of people of my vintage, it was the controversies around the Florida election that drew us in, and then elections and how they’re run sort of receded into the background until we got to the 2016 election, where then-candidate Trump shined a much brighter spotlight on it, then of course during the pandemic here and trying to conduct an election during the pandemic and all of the changes – again, another bright spotlight on it.

And when we look around the country, many election offices have very little in the way of budget or other resources to do voter education, and so it often falls to NGOs, to civil society, and frankly to the political parties and to candidates themselves to educate about this process.  And this is one of the sort of challenges and one of the places in which this federal system is a little bit of a problem.  If we had a unified system, it might be easier to have concerted efforts around voter education and those sorts of efforts.

There is research and there are a number of election officials who collaborate and work with best practice recommendations around this.  Some of that is done by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the United States Government; some of it done by independent researchers, my colleagues in academia, to help election officials be effective at this.  

This is the challenge.  I keep talking about standing in a river of misinformation – there is no similar river pushing in the other direction, no – the flow of disinformation and misinformation, quite frankly, often can dwarf the voter education efforts that would push in the other direction towards correct information, making sure that people have that correct information.  That is one of the realities and one of the biggest challenges facing election administration in the United States today.

**QUESTION:**  Thanks, Chris.

**MODERATOR:**  And we do have a question in the chat I’ll read.  It’s from Barbara Noordermeer from the Dutch Financial Newspaper.  “What is the rationale behind states demanding voters register up to 30 days before Election Day?  Are there any positives to that” – are there – “and how would you rate the voting process in general in the U.S.?  As a foreigner, it seems certain states unnecessarily complicate the process, but maybe I’m overlooking something.”

**MR MANN:**  Again, I’ll take the second part first, and better a broad set of scholars’ assessment versus just my own personal opinion, and that is that the United States voter registration system is considered by scholars who look at elections administration across the world to be quite difficult, definitely at one end of the spectrum in placing the burden of voter registration on the voter, and it is, as I noted, separate from other government processes.  So if you look to our neighbors in the north, in Canada, they have a national agency.  It is responsible for registering everyone.  It is a separate process, but the burden falls on the government to make sure everyone is registered.  I apologize for not knowing exactly what it is in the Netherlands, but in many European countries, voter registration is part and parcel with other contact about registering where you live for a variety of purposes.  And voter registration is part of that and there’s very little burden – essentially no net additional burden – over other requirements that you notify the government where you reside.  So yes, the United States is definitely at one end of the spectrum and not a very positive one in terms of being fairly high burden compared to other countries.

And there is variation.  There’s some good research that I’d be happy to pass along through Jake looking at the costs of voter registration.  It’s an academic article.  The title is “The Cost of Voter Registration Index,” where scholars have literally gone through and estimated the burden from each of these different policies and how it stacks up across the states.

Jake, can you refresh my memory about the first part of the question?  I’m sorry.  I forgot it.

**MODERATOR:**  Sure, no problem.  It is, “What is the rationale behind states demanding voters to register up to 30 days before the Election Day?  Are there any positives to that?”

**MR MANN:**  So apologies for a bit of a history lesson, but – so there was a clear sense back in 1993, which is a long time ago now, both in literal time but also in technology – very clear understanding that deadlines that were 60 days or 90 days, that far in advance, were intended to keep people out of the system.  Largely it was people who were politically engaged, longtime residents who had been registered, so that had multiple layers of discrimination.  

The 30-day compromise in the National Voter Registration Act was in part with election officials who said, “We need time because we need to process all the voter registrations that we receive,” and it is very true that there is a surge right up to the deadline.  And back in 1993, there was no online voter registration, so it was paper forms, handwritten.  They had to be hand-entered, and then they had to print out books that went to every single polling place – hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions of them across the country – and have those ready to go on Election Day.  And that simply took time.

And so that is the rationale from an administrative side of allowing states to have up to 30 days.  Clearly we have come a long ways since 1993.  Many states now use what are referred to as e-poll books.  That is basically a tablet that’s got that loaded on; you’re not talking about printing paper.  It’s much easier to distribute those, much easier to update them.  We now have scanners.  We now have online voter registration.  All of those things reduce that burden and it allows states to register people up to and on Election Day.  That technological change is why we have Election Day voter registration now.  

So that is the rationale, sort of the historical one.  You could point to it today and the choices that would be made and what election officials would say about the time they need would probably be very different, just because we’re in a very different time, in order to deal with the process.  But that is – that is the rationale for the process, and it simply hasn’t been updated in the last 30 years. 

**MODERATOR:**  Okay.  So again, journalists, if you have a question, please raise your hand, the raise hand icon.  I think that last question is a good transition to another pre-submitted question we have that I’ll read to you:  “Are there any statistics that show if voter registration rules and laws affect turnout?  For example, is turnout higher in places where registration is easier?” 

**MR MANN:**  This is where I have to go and be a professor for a moment.  So this is really hard to untangle.  At a superficial level, there is a pretty strong correlation between easy voting rules and higher turnout.  The question – and the reason that I’m being cautious about saying that easier rules lead to turnout – is that places with a history and a culture of higher turnout are more likely to pass laws that make it easier to register to vote.  So we have a chicken-and-the-egg problem here from a scholarly point of view.  

That said, there are some examples and some research where it’s quite clear.  For example, the requirement to register to vote in advance is something that’s – that was largely a 20th century – late 19th but largely a 20th century process, and we can look at when that was instituted across the 20th century and seeing that the requirement to register in advance did tend to lower turnout.  

There is mixed evidence about some of the more recent reforms – automatic voter registration.  I am looking forward to new research that I just saw as work in progress at a conference but not yet finished enough to say that about automatic voter registration or online voter registration.  There is very, very clear evidence by my friend and colleague, Mike Hanmer from the University of Maryland, and others that same-day registration probably does increase turnout versus having the requirement to register in advance. 

So probably, or I should say some things are definitely increasing turnout – not by huge amounts.  So we’re talking 1, 2, 3 percentage points, not 10 or 20 percentage points, for these individual reforms.  And some reforms it’s not clear how much it is easing the administrative burden on election officials, making it easier for them, making it easier for voters to do things like update their registration and register for the first time, but they would get over the hurdles if they had to do it a harder way.  So – but yeah, I’ll stop there because I feel like I’m going in the academic weeds here.  So I’ll stop myself. 

**MODERATOR:**  Those are good answers.  Not seeing any other questions; we’ll go ahead and end the Q&A session here.  Dr. Mann, I wanted to turn it over to you to offer any last thoughts you might have on the subject to the journalists. 

**MR MANN:**  So thought number one is please feel free to reach out.  Happy to answer any questions or direct you to others who may have more expertise about specifics.  I think the takeaway here for those of – since all of you are coming from other countries is that the voter registration system in the U.S. is, as I’ve said several times, distinctive in its federalism and its complexity.  It is, frankly, not a place where I think most Americans who know and understand the system would say that we should be a model for the world.  But it is something that is very important, both the voting system – the voter registration system and the voting system that’s attached to it.  

So I really appreciate your work in trying to explain it to your readers, your audiences, so you can understand this process – they can understand this process as we go through this very consequential election.  And again, I’m happy to be a resource personally or help you identify the experts who can explain this to you. 

**MODERATOR:**  Well, thank you so much, Dr. Mann, for giving us your time today.  And thank you to all the journalists who have joined us.  This ends today’s briefing.  Thank you so much.

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