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Automatic Registration and How It Would Affect the United States

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Stacey Abrams on automatic Registration and the potential, and positive, effects it could have within America.

Video transcript

- Can you talk about why automatic registration would check both those boxes of more participation and secure elections?

STACEY ABRAMS: The United States is a singularity among most democratized industrialized nations. We are one of the few countries that requires citizens to take ownership of registration. In almost every other mature democracy, it is an automatic process, in part, because of the complicated nature of registration by individual.

You have to know the laws where you live. You have to know the timetables. You have to know the rules for being on or off of those roles. And automatic registration simplifies access. It doesn't guarantee participation. It doesn't create more voter fraud. It simply says this is a perquisite of being an American. You're a citizen, you're registered. And automatic registration removes the necessity of voter purges.

It also removes the necessity of voters getting to the polling place and suddenly realizing, oops, I should have known on September 29 that was my last day to get to have a voice, because my job moved me here on October 31. And so part of the responsibility is that this brings America into alignment with itself. We have 50 different democracies operating right now where each state gets to set its own rules and gets to determine who gets to enter.

If we had automatic registration, you could move anywhere. You would add onto this piece called same day registration, which means if I move from Indiana to North Dakota, I just walk in. In fact, North Dakota is a bad example, because they don't register voters. If I move from North Dakota to Indiana, I could go in, and I could register, because I'm automatically allowed to vote because of my citizenship, and my registration just lets them know where I'm voting from at this point. That is a simple solution that works for almost every nation, and the United States is not a leader on this. We are an outlier, and in fact, we are well behind most nations on solving this problem.