Same Day Voter Registration a "Problem" Scott Walker Intends to Fix

[marmar]

Published on Monday, November 26, 2012 by PR Watch
Same Day Voter Registration a "Problem" Scott Walker Intends to Fix

by Brendan Fischer


As the final votes are tallied, it is becoming clear that Barack Obama won reelection November 6, 2012 with a higher popular vote than Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1980, thanks in part to near-record turnout from young people and people of color. High voter turnout is celebrated in some quarters as a sign of a vibrant democracy, but among Wisconsin's GOP leadership, the state's consistently high voter participation rate is apparently viewed as a "problem" that needs fixing.

With Wisconsin's voter ID law blocked by two judges as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, Governor Scott Walker appeared before a sold-out crowd at the Ronald Reagan Library in Los Angeles on November 19, just weeks after his state reelected President Obama and elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate, and announced his plan to end Wisconsin's 40-year-old same-day registration law. "States across the country that have same-day registration have real problems," he explained to the crowd.

Same Day Registration Helps Voter Turnout

Those "problems" appear to include high voting rates. Nine states, including Wisconsin, allow voters to register on election day, and these states are among those with the highest turnout in the country. According to a study at George Mason University, the top six turnout states in the 2008 election were Minnesota (where 77.7 percent of all eligible voters cast a ballot), Wisconsin (72.1 percent), New Hampshire (71.1 percent), Maine (70.9 percent), Colorado (70.2 percent) and Iowa (69.7 percent). All but Colorado had election-day registration.

Students, people of color, and the poor are most likely to register on election day -- largely because they are more likely to have moved since the last time they voted -- and would be most affected by eliminating the same-day registration law. Those populations tend to vote for Democrats. In 2008, fifteen percent of all Wisconsin voters (approximately 460,000 people) registered on election day. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest city and the state's highest concentration of people of color, 48,000 voters took advantage of same-day registration, helping boost turnout in that city to 87 percent. Wisconsinite and Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan blamed GOP losses on "surprise" turnout "in urban areas." ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/26-5

[Coyotl]

1. 2008: 15% of all Wisconsin voters, 460,000 people, registered on election day = WOW n/t