Bipartisan Group Calls for Overdue Updates to Improve Integrity and Save Time and Money
Chief campaign lawyers Marc Elias & Trevor Potter bring together former Sens. Daschle, Danforth, Reps. Molinari, Ford, election officials and voting experts
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, traditional political opponents put aside their differences in an effort to improve the voting process for all Americans. A distinguished array of Democratic and Republican former Members of Congress, Secretaries of State, local elections administrators and election law experts announced the formation of the "Committee to Modernize Voter Registration." The group is dedicated to bringing the voter registration system into the 21st century by automating the outmoded system that relies on paper forms being filled out by voters and manually processed by local elections officials.
The Committee is led by co-chairs Marc Elias, former General Counsel for Kerry-Edwards 2004 and lead recount lawyer for Franken 2008, and Trevor Potter, former General Counsel for the 2000 and 2008 McCain presidential campaigns. Other members of the Committee include former UN Ambassador and Senator John Danforth (R-MO); former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD); former U.S. Representatives Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN) and Susan Molinari (R-NY); Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro A. Cortes and former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro; local election officials Matthew Damschroder, Deputy Director, Franklin County Board of Elections (OH) and Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County; and elections experts Dr. Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Norm Ornstein, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute's Election Reform Project, and Doug Chapin, director of Election Initiatives for the Pew Center on the States, a division of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The Pew Center on the States also released "Bringing Elections into the 21st Century: Voter Registration Modernization," an issue brief that highlights the underperformance of the current voter registration system and provides Pew's broad recommendations for a modernized system that is more accurate, cost-effective and efficient.
Through their experiences on presidential and other federal campaigns dealing with voter registration problems across the country, Elias and Potter came to recognize the scope of the problem with the current patchwork system. Although they work for competing political parties, the seasoned election attorneys have found common ground on a series of commonsense upgrades to the voter registration system.
"Marc and I may find ourselves on opposite sides of many issues, but we both agree that the voter registration process in this country is in serious need of an overhaul," said Potter.
"Throughout our campaign work, we saw firsthand the inefficiency and needless expense in our paper-based registration system,"he said."The way we register voters in this country does not adequately protect against registration fraud, burdens election officials and also blocks eligible voters from the ballot box."
Many of the troubling problems faced by voters on Election Day can be traced back to registration issues. The problems associated with reading hand-written registration forms and the deluge of registrations submitted immediately prior to an important election contribute to a domino effect of inefficiencies that cause problems at every step of the process.
"The registration system affects all other election-related activities downstream, from how quickly your absentee ballot request is processed to the accuracy of poll books on Election Day," said Elias.
"Fixing this process means that election officials can get back into the business of administering elections and campaigns, and third parties will no longer have to be in the business of registering voters," he said.
Members of the Committee stressed the need to begin the conversation and encourage Congress to act while the experience of last year's election is still fresh in voters' minds, but before the politics of the next election cycle distract from the urgent call for reform.
The Committee's launch event was hosted at the Washington, D.C. offices of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
"Pew has been heavily engaged in the issue of voter registration modernization since December 2008, when our post-election 'Voting in America' summit revealed deep frustration with our nation's current underperforming voter registration system," said Chapin.
"Pew shares the Committee's commitment to identifying fact-based, workable, bipartisan approaches to modernization, and we stand ready to work with election officials to make them a reality."
Specifically, the Committee asserts that the best way to modernize the voter registration system would be to use existing databases to automatically register voters. Importantly, this would remove the role of third parties in registering eligible voters.
Additionally, the Committee is advocating for a system that will allow a registration to be portable so that voters are not forced to re-register when they move within a state, and will include a fail-safe mechanism for any Election Day problems.
The Committee advocates a commonsense, technologically-based approach to solving many of these problems. For instance, by using existing government databases to automatically register voters, they assert, states and local governments could save scarce financial and staff resources that would otherwise be spent shuffling, entering and reviewing reams of paper registration forms.
For more information on the Committee and its work, please visit: www.modernizeregistration.org.
SOURCE Committee to Modernize Voter Registration
Committee to Modernize Voter Registration
