Last week, advocates across the nation celebrated \u201cNational Voter Registration Day.\u201d\u00a0 In New York, there was little to celebrate.<\/p>\n
According to the U.S. Elections Project, in the 2014 election only the state of Indiana had a lower voter turnout than New York.\u00a0 That\u2019s right; New York was 49th<\/sup> in the nation in voter participation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, New York\u2019s miserable performance is not an aberration; New York has consistently ranked as one of the nation\u2019s worst states for voter participation.<\/p>\n There a many reasons for this sad ranking:\u00a0 More competitive races tend to lead to higher voter turnout.\u00a0 The gubernatorial election wasn’t ever tight, and even with the Republican challenger winning most of the counties in the state, Governor Cuomo\u00a0beat him handily in the overall vote total.\u00a0 According to the New York State Board of Elections, about 3.8 million people voted in that election. The Board considers nearly 11 million people eligible to vote.\u00a0 Thus, only about 30 percent of registered voters cast their ballots for the race to determine the most powerful elected official in the state.<\/p>\n Non-competitive elections can smother voter turnout, but there are also barriers to getting registered to vote.<\/p>\n New York State had a \u201cvoting eligible population\u201d of about 13.5 million in 2014.\u00a0 The state Board of Elections reports that nearly 11 million New Yorkers are considered registered to vote.\u00a0 That means that roughly 2.5 million eligible citizens were not registered to vote.<\/p>\n What are the barriers to voting in New York?<\/p>\n One big obstacle is the registration process itself.\u00a0 Like much of the rest of the country, New York requires voters to register to vote.\u00a0 In most of the rest of the democratic world, there\u2019s no separate step called registration. It happens automatically. Thus, registering citizens to vote is the responsibility of the government.\u00a0 The voter just has to show up.<\/p>\n In the United States, the responsibility is on the citizen to get registered.<\/p>\n New York has taken some steps to make it easier to register.\u00a0 For example, an eligible voter can go the Board of Elections website (elections.ny.gov) and download a PDF version of the registration form, fill it out and send it in.\u00a0 While a step forward, in the modern age an online system \u2013 in which a voter can register electronically \u2013 makes more sense.<\/p>\n New York has moved toward a full online voter registration system.\u00a0 It began allowing people with driver’s licenses to register to vote online\u00a0through the Department of Motor Vehicles in 2012. \u00a0The governor’s office said last week that\u00a0more than 195,000 people had registered to vote that way \u2014 53,000 of them for the first time.<\/p>\n While that\u2019s good, it doesn\u2019t make a big dent in the effort to register the millions of New Yorkers not yet registered who wish to do so.\u00a0 And for those who are not drivers, the DMV program is of little help.<\/p>\n An obvious next step would be to expand that program found in the DMV to all other state agencies.\u00a0 Those other agencies have databases of people they serve and collect a wealth of information \u2013 information that’s relevant to register to vote.\u00a0 Yet when it’s time to register, it\u2019s back with paper and pen to fill out a hard copy form or a PDF version found online.\u00a0 The governor can expand the DMV program to all agencies through his budget plan.<\/p>\n In addition, in New York State, voters are typically required to register 25 days before an election \u2013 well before most voters tune into the election debates.\u00a0 The state should allow New Yorkers to register and vote on Election Day.\u00a0 Each year, just as interest in elections and candidates begins to peak, potential voters find that the deadline for registering to vote has already passed.\u00a0 Such a system would dramatically increase voting rates.\u00a0 Voter participation rates in \u201csame-day\u201d states are traditionally among the highest in the country.<\/p>\n New York should allow for full online voter registration, automatic registration of eligible citizens, pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds, party changes later in the election cycle, \u201csame-day\u201d registration, and automatic transfers of registrations for New Yorkers who move within the state.<\/p>\n In taking those steps, New York can start to move from national laggard in voter participation, to national leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, advocates across the nation celebrated \u201cNational Voter Registration Day.\u201d\u00a0 In New York, there was little to celebrate. According to the U.S. Elections Project, in the 2014 election only the state of Indiana had a lower voter turnout than New York.\u00a0 That\u2019s right; New York was 49th in the nation in voter participation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,102,28],"class_list":["post-1544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-elections","tag-voter-registration","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}