[EL] Election Day Registration

[David Adamany]

In the 1970s I served as chair of the State Elections Board in Wisconsin.   We largely were responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws and did not administer elections.   But I had a good perch for watching election law developments.   Wisconsin was the second state to adopt Election Day Registration.   Voter turnout rose markedly and remains high today as compared to most other states.   Periodic assertions of voter fraud, usually by Republicans, have over the years led to investigations by local law enforcement and by the U.S. Attorney.  In all these decades there have not been more than a couple of dozen convictions and no real evidence of abuse that would make any real difference--a handful of ineligible voters, at most, in any election.   If campaign costs have increased it has not been at any higher rate than in the rest of the country on a per capita basis.   EDR produces many fewer dangers to election integrity than does manipulation of early voting days (has Florida learned it's lesson/), inadequate staffing of polling places (will Ohio ever improve?), voting machines that do not give voters a paper receipt to allow them to make sure their voters were properly recorded (almost everywhere), and a host of similar voting problems.  Perhaps the best testimony on behalf of EDR is that is has spread to a number of other states, which also report few difficulties, and that no state that has adopted EDR has later abandoned it.   I would think the professors, pundits, and politicians on this list would have more urgent things to be alarmed about than a registration system that produces, among other things, far higher turnout of voters than most of America's troubled election systems.



David Adamany
Laura Carnell Professor of Law
and Political Science, and
Chancellor
1810 Liacouras Walk, Ste 330
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA 19122
(215) 204-9278

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