Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:39:04.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Registering and Voting with Motor Voter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Raymond E. Wolfinger
Affiliation:
Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent articles, coauthored with Benjamin Highton, are “The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle” (American Journal of Political Science 2001) and “The Political Implications of Higher Turnout” (British Journal of Political Science 2001).
Jonathan Hoffman
Affiliation:
Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Extract

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 (P.L. 103-31) was designed to reduce the cost of voting by incorporating registration into a transaction with a public agency that citizens initiate for another purpose. The act took effect on January 1, 1995; between then and the 1996 election, 18,333,479 people registered in offices they had visited on other business (Federal Election Commission 1998, Table 2).Most of these were new registrations; the remainder were largely changes of address. (We are grateful to Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission for his help in interpreting this table.) They are 44% of the total of 41.1 million “registration applications or transactions” of any sort recorded in the 43 states subject to the NVRA in 1995–96. Six states are exempt from the NVRA; five—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—because they permit electionday registration at the polling place and North Dakota, which does not require voter registration. Vermont's constitutional provisions kept it from implementing the NVRA by 1996. Four years later, answers to even the most elementary questions about this first NVRA election have not been published. We narrow the data gap by describing people who used NVRA to register, and then comparing their participation to that of their fellow citizens who registered to vote using more traditional methods.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

* Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission generously provided data and guidance that immeasurably aided our research. We benefited also from advice from Margaret Rosenfield and comments on an earlier draft from Benjamin Highton and Scott McClurg. The data set we analyzed was obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research through UC Data Archive and Technical Assistance (UC DATA) of the University of California, Berkeley. None of these organizations is responsible for our analyses or interpretations. We are grateful for financial support from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation.