Voter registration is a tool used to keep people from voting. It’s another feature of our political system that goes pretty much unchallenged.
Is It The Norm?
The truth is that American voter registration is far outside the norm in modern democracies. Most countries do the opposite of what America does. In other nations, it is the government’s obligation to ensure that every citizen is registered to vote.
In some places, every citizen is automatically certified as an eligible voter when they reach voting age. In others, the government pays people to go door to door to make sure everyone is registered.
As Francis Fox Piven and Richard Clower point out in their book Why Americans Don’t Vote, The United States is the only major democracy where the government assumes no responsibility for helping citizens with voter registration.
This is bad because putting private organizations in charge of registering voters skews the electorate.
The Rich Get The Vote
People who have money want voters to support the policies that will help them keep their money. Therefore, the people with money give to groups that will make sure the people who get registered are the ones who are most likely to support the policies that are good for the rich.
Likewise, the major political parties want the support of people with money, so they are more than willing to play along. Pleasing the rich is what keeps the major parties competitive in America’s money-driven political economy. Private funding encourages class-based politics.
One study exploring the decrease in voter turnout between the 1960s and the 1980s found that half of the decline was because the major parties stopped contacting voters. Voter mobilization has a class bias. Neither Democrats nor Republicans ever stopped reaching out to upper-income earners. That’s because when rich folks are mobilized, they are more likely to give candidates money. One voter mobilization study showed that Democratic efforts to reach out to top-income earners jumped almost 400% between 1980 and 2004.
The major parties want the rich to be interested in politics so that they can keep milking them for campaign cash. If you aren’t loaded, then the parties don’t care as much if you vote.
What Can We Do
The only way to guarantee that all citizens are registered is to make it a public priority, supported by the government, as other democracies do. It’s estimated that if the United States started automatic voter registration, some 50 million people would be added to the voter rolls, doubtlessly increasing voter turnout.
But that would be a huge threat to the existing power structure, which also makes it a great reason to support the change.