[EL] Madison (WI) new law this week requiring landlords to distribute voter reg forms

[Dan Johnson]

Innovative news on the voter registration front (the attack back in the War
on Voting continues)...

*From:* Progressive Advocacy <dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com>
*Date:* July 18, 2012 7:14:51 PM CDT
*To:* dan at ProgressivePublicAffairs.com
*Subject:* *Progressive Advocacy*

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Madison WI and Washington State attack back on the war on
voting<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ProgressiveAdvocacy/~3/oLTdrytwJNE/madison-wi-and-washington-state-attack.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email>

Posted: 17 Jul 2012 10:45 PM PDT
Fantastic news.

Progressive state and local governments are attacking back on the
Republican's anti-American war on voting by implementing forward-thinking
laws and policies that reduce the barriers between citizens and their
ballots.

Yesterday, the Madison (WI) City Council passed an
ordinance<http://madison.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=1144324&GUID=D002BEF2-80C7-4F85-97BD-5AB5E0FAE4F8>adding
the voter
registration form<http://www.cityofmadison.com/election/voter/documents/VoterRegistrationApplication-English-WithArrows-Fillable.pdf>to
the pile of paper documents that landlords must distribute to tenants
when they move in. This is now law, just in time for the August move-in for
UW-Madison students. Half the housing units in Madison are rental units and
a large percentage of those units turn over every
year<http://host.madison.com/article_e1b34b38-c8b8-11e1-a53d-0019bb2963f4.html>
.

As Alder Bridget
Maniaci<http://madison.legistar.com/PersonDetail.aspx?ID=79730&GUID=41E80667-D780-4522-8E21-903D7DA04DEE>,
the lead sponsor of the proposal explains, providing voter registration
information to citizens when they move into a new place makes sense, since
that's when people are changing their address (and they are probably
unaware that they must proactively tell some obscure unit of local
government they have moved in order to vote months later). From the
Isthmus<http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=37268>
:


 The way citizens in the United States vote is based on where they live,
Maniaci adds, which means it is sensible to provide them with voting
information when they change addresses.
"To provide to tenants voter registration forms at the time they move in,
when most individuals are in the process of changing all of their other
household information, everything from Netflix to their post-office address
to the DMV, that's a very natural time to do this," she says.

As a bonus, getting citizens to register to vote early is cheaper for the
city clerk to process than registering people in the crunch leading up to
the election, so distributing these voter registration forms will save
taxpayers some money.

On the West Coast, Washington State's Secretary of State is unveiling an
app that will allow users to register to vote through Facebook. Since
Washington State already uses online voter registration, pulling the data
from a user's Facebook account and importing it into the voter registration
program will make it easier for people to
register<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018708721_apusvoterregistrationfacebook1stldwritethru.html>--
and people can tell their friends about how they registered to vote,
creating more of a social norm of democratic self-governance through
participation.

Congratulations to Washington and Madison (named after two Founding
Fathers, coincidentally) for further implementing the great democratic
spirit of our American Republic.

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