On voting reforms

IN THE face of America’s abysmal voter participation rates, lawmakers have two choices: They can make voting easier, or they can make it harder.

Illinois made the right choice this week, becoming the 10th state, along with the District of Columbia, to enact automatic voter registration. The bill, which could add as many as a million voters to the state’s rolls, was signed by Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican who had vetoed similar legislation last year.

Under the new law, all eligible voters will be registered to vote when they visit the Department of Motor Vehicles or other state agencies. If they do not want to be registered, they may opt out.

“The right to vote is foundational for the rights of Americans in our democracy,” Rauner said at a bill-signing ceremony on Monday. “We as a people need to do everything we can to knock down barriers, remove hurdles for all those who are eligible to vote, to be able to vote.”

These are incontestable propositions, and yet for most officials from Rauner’s party, showing even mild support for them is apostasy.

Meanwhile in Oregon, which in 2015 became the first state to pass automatic voter registration, more than 272 000 people were registered in the law’s first year, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.

Of these, 116 000 were found to be unlikely to have registered otherwise, and 40 000 of that group voted in 2016, helping Oregon achieve the nation’s largest turnout increase from 2012 – 4.1 points, to 68.3 percent.

Contrary to Republican fears, that increase did not equal Democratic gains. Democrats lost seats in the State Legislature, even though the new voters were more racially diverse than previously registered voters.

In other words, increasing voter participation should be a bipartisan project. That hasn’t been the case for years, and it won’t be as long as President Trump is in the White House, deputising his merry band of vote suppressors to justify his myth of illegal voters.