Election day voter registration used to be the norm
in Oregon. Change addresses right before a big vote? No worries. You could just head down to the polls, fill out a new registration card and be handed a ballot to mark up and drop in the box.
No one really questioned the integrity of the system or the potential for abuse. Then things took a weird turn in the mid-1980s – and “weird” doesn’t really do it justice – when the New Age Meets New Delhi commune of Rajneeshpuram took root near the tiny eastern Oregon burg of Antelope. After a series of land-use disputes with suspicious locals, the scarlet-clad swami and his acolytes had an inspiration: they’d throw the next election. The commune tried to bus in hundreds of street people from Portland to sign up and vote for the Antelope town council, a move finally derailed in the courts. Shaken by such outright fraud, Oregonians put the kibosh on voter-day registration in 1986, changing the state constitution to establish a 20-day cut-off.
While it might seem a draconian response to a highly unusual circumstance, the registration cut-off actually put Oregon back in the mainstream; today, only six states in the union offer same-day service at the polls. So we’re not really sure why there’s a move afoot to establish voting-day registration in Washington, but indeed, there it is – now before the Legislature is Senate Bill 5561, which would let you register and cast a ballot on election day.
While it has intuitive appeal – anything that makes it easier for folks to vote must be a good thing, right? – the measure has drawn opposition from elections officials around the state, including our own Kitsap County Auditor Karen Flynn. She and her colleagues are wary of a change that would logjam two sensitive and time-intensive processes: figuring out who gets to vote, and then counting their ballots. Washingtonians currently have two registration cutoffs – 30 days if they sign up by mail, two weeks if they do so in person – and even so, Flynn’s office sees healthy queues at each, as new voters and folks who’ve changed address show up to get their name on the election rolls. Having tens of thousands of folks register and vote on the same day would only slow down the returns and hurt the integrity of the results – particularly as counties struggle to cross-check their lists to make sure nobody has voted more than once.
If boosting poll participation is the goal, inroads have already been made through “motor voter” programs and (soon) online voter registration. And let’s not forget mail balloting, which besides higher turnouts has arguably led to cleaner elections. Because huge numbers of folks return their ballots as soon as they show up in the mail – three weeks before the actual election day – desperate campaigns are less likely to use sleaze attacks and other chicanery to sway people at the last minute. Allowing election-day registration only invites last-minute abuses by campaigns trying to manipulate otherwise disengaged citizens.
We concede it’s unlikely that any new-age swamis will be hijacking Washington elections anytime soon (although we wouldn’t put it past NASCAR to bus in a few thousand yokels to vote for a racetrack). But really: if a citizen can’t be bothered to register to vote over the previous 50 weeks – even as campaigns hit full flurry and voter awareness peaks – why accommodate them at the very last minute?
Face it: they’ve disenfranchised themselves.
