Report: Ending Same Day Wisconsin Voter Registration Would Cost $14.5 Million

When Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) announced he would no longer support his own plan to do away with same day voter registration in Wisconsin, he struck a blow to voter suppression and may have saved millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

A new report from the Government Accountability Board suggests that ending the state’s same day voter registration program, which allows eligible voters to register to vote at the polling station on election day, would cost several state agencies a combined $14.5 million:

The staff of the GAB, which oversees the state’s elections, studied the idea and in a preliminary report in December estimated its costs for the first two years after a change would increase by $5.2 million.

The estimate increased dramatically Monday for two reasons.

Since December, four affected state departments — transportation, workforce development, health services and children and families — have submitted their own cost estimates totaling between $9.9 million and $10.5 million, said GAB spokesman Reid Magney.

After the GAB’s initial report in December, when the projected cost of ending ending same day registration was a third of the latest estimates, Gov. Walker told reporters that he would stop his pursuit to end the program, citing the cost. But other Republican legislators in the state may still opt to pursue a bill to strip away same day registration, and Walker has not signaled that he would veto a potential bill. Nationwide, Republicans have waged war on voter rights in the last several years, supporting discriminatory voter ID laws while simultaneously seeking to end early voting and same day registration with little regard for the costs, both financial and otherwise.

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Judge Faults Louisiana For Inadequate Voter Registration Efforts

A federal judge ruled this week that Louisiana violated federal voting law in not offering voter registration opportunities to applicants and recipients of public benefits programs such as food stamps, WIC and Medicaid. In yet another court affirmation of unfettered access to voting, U.S. District Court Judge Jane Triche Milazzo faulted the secretary of state for taking no action “to ensure that the State comply” with its obligations under the National Voter Registration Act, intended to facilitate voter registration opportunities for all citizens.

After an election cycle characterized by dogged efforts to make it more difficult to access the ballot, attorney Ron Wilson said the value of the decision “cannot be overstated” in giving “due meaning to the purpose behind the enactment of the NVRA, to make it easier, and not more difficult, for individuals to register to vote.”

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Hungarian Court Tosses Out Voter Registration Requirement

In the United States, ten states plus the District of Columbia allow voters to register to vote on election day — effectively removing the registration requirement as an obstacle to the fundamental right to vote. In the overwhelming majority of states, however, activists and political campaigns often have to race to register voters before a deadline. And conservative politicians have even raised artificial barriers to registration in an effort to reduce the franchise.

It does not have to be this way, however. To the contrary, a constitutional court in Hungary just struck down the conservative government’s attempt to impose an American-style voter registration system on its electorate:

[Prime Minister Viktor] Orban’s Fidesz-Christian Democrat alliance approved a new voting system in November in one of the most hotly contested steps of a flurry of reforms that included a new constitution and a swathe of laws that critics say entrench Fidesz’s power.

“Mindful of the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, the Constitutional Court has established that for those with Hungarian residency the registration requirement represents an undue restriction on voting rights and is therefore unconstitutional,” the court said in a statement.

It added that voter registration for Hungarians outside the borders was justified.

The changes would have required 8 million domestic voters to register in person or online at least two weeks before elections in 2014. Voters currently only have to turn up at polling stations on election day to be identified from an existing state-run database and cast their vote.

Automatic or mandatory voter registration systems are increasingly common in modern democracies. They are now the rule in Australia, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Admittedly, such a system would be more difficult to implement in the United States, where voter rolls are maintained by many state governments rather than one central government, but same day registration achieves many of the benefits of automatic registration by similarly ensuring that registration will not be an obstacle to voting.

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