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1 Kevin Morris & Peter Dunphy, AVR Impact on State Voter Registration 1 (2019)

handle is hein.brennan/avripsvr0001 and id is 1 raw text is: AVR Impact on State Voter Registration New Brennan Center Report Finds Significant Gains in Voter Rolls by Kevin Morris and Peter Dunphy Executive Summary Over the past five years, a significant reform of voter registration has been enacted and implemented across the country. Automatic voter registration or AVR offers the chance to modernize our election infrastructure so that many more citizens are accurately registered to vote.' AVR features two seemingly small but transformative chang- es to how people register to vote: 1. Citizens who interact with government agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles are registered to vote, unless they decline. In other words, a person is registered unless they opt out, instead of being required to opt in. 2. The information citizens provide as part of their applica- tion for government services is electronically transmitted to elections officials, who verify their eligibility to vote. This process is seamless and secure. In the past five years, 15 states and the District of Columbia have adopted AVR.2 (Three states - Connecticut, Utah, and New Mexico - have adopted something very close to automatic registration. )3 How has automatic registration worked? Has it, in fact, increased registration rates as its proponents had hoped? This report is the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of AVR on voter registration rates. In the past, individual states have reported increases in voter registration since the adop- tion of automatic voter registration. But that could be due to many factors, such as compelling candidates or demographic change. Previous analyses have not spoken as to cause and ef- fect or examined the impact of different approaches to AVR. Is it possible to isolate the impact of automatic registration itself? This multistate analysis leverages low-level voter file data from around the country and cutting-edge statistical tools to present estimates of automatic voter registration's impact on registration numbers. This report finds: * AVR markedly increases the number of voters being reg- istered - increases in the number of registrants ranging from 9 to 94 percent. * These registration increases are found in big and small states, as well as states with different partisan makeups. These gains are found across different versions of the reform. For example, voters must be given the opportunity to opt out (among other things, to protect ineligible people from accidentally being registered). Nearly all of the states with AVR give that option at the point of contact with govern- 1 Brennan Center for Justice

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