89.31% of the Voting Age Population is registered to vote in Canada, and 97.2% in Sweden. In contrast, in the USA, one third of voters of voters are left behind- even in such a critical and vibrant election as this one.
Indeed, the US system of voter registration (“self-initiated system”), which puts the burden of registration exclusively on the voter, not on the government, very often acts as a barrier to political participation and turnout.
Because registration is voluntary, this system requires citizen initiative and thus tends to leave out many who would otherwise be eligible to vote. In fact, many eligible voters may be unable to register (women with small children, those without easy access to transportation, people who have a job with busy schedule, students…) or simply forget to do it…Thus the voter registration system may partly explain why the United States ranks 140 out of 163 countries based on turnout of the voting age population since 1990, according to experts who study elections abroad [1]

Another major drawback of this system is the large role left to civic-minded organizations, partisans and religious organizations, that actually increases the risk of election fraud- this phenomenon has been recently highlighted by the ACORN polemic, as it has been during the 2004 elections by partisan organizations in Nevada throwing away voter registration forms filled out by citizens who supported the opposing party. In addition, our voter registration system is to a large extent responsible of the registration rush phenomenon not giving administrators enough time to prepare appropriately for the actual number of voters coming to the polls, which often results in long lines.

In contrast, the Canadian and Swedish systems (as well as most democracies, notably Japan, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, and even Iraq) are “state-initiated” ones: in these countries, the governments consider that they have the responsibility to protect their citizens’ constitutional right to vote by ensuring that they are duly registered to vote. Voting is thus protected as a fundamental citizenship right.

Technically, how does it work ? How do, in practical terms, the governments ensure full, accurate and inclusive voting rolls?

State-initiated voter registration systems may actually take many forms: Italian-style links to national population registers to records of residence maintained by police or local governments, links to application for government services, door-to-door registration campaigns…
The solution chosen by both the Canadian and the Swedish election authorities is the formation of partnerships with other government bodies in order to facilitate list-updates. When citizens change their place of residence, they often inform government agencies such as the post office, the tax bureau, the health insurance system… Data-sharing partnerships allow the election authority to receive regular updates of changes to these bodies’ files. This makes it possible to update the electoral register without any direct contact between the voter and the election authority.

These partnerships are particularly efficient and useful regarding deletions (voters that no longer qualify: death, criminal conviction…) since this information is often failed to be provided by the individual or his or her family. List maintenance procedures can be designed to incorporate data from sources such as government vital statistics offices, the obituary page in newspapers, funeral homes, courts, health authorities (information on mental incompetence).

For instance, Elections Canada, the Canadian election management body, updates the voter rolls thanks to data provided by Canada Revenue Agency, Canada Post, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and the Local registrars of motor vehicles about changes of adress, citizens turning 18, new citizens and deaths.

In Sweden, the maintenance of a general population register is handled by the local offices of the Swedish Tax Administration. Most information details are provided by other agencies that frequently interact with the public such as the Social insurance offices, municipalities, police…In addition, in a small number of cases (birth, residence, marriage) every individual resident is required by law to provide the local tax office certain info as well as changes of amendments to such recorded info (divorce, change of name, change of residence…). The information contained in the population registration database is shared with other government agencies, including the Swedish Election Authority, on a need basis: for every election, the Swedish electoral authority extracts information from this database to compile an electoral roll for each district (which includes the name, address, place of birth, and marital status of each individual), and then sends proof of registration to each eligible voter.

Indeed, the American way of conducting voter registration and elections is anything but universal, and far from being efficient. Time to catch up!

[1]Voter turnout since 1945: a global report. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2002

Rob Richie is director of FairVote. See his page at fairvote.org for more information.

FairVote’s analysis team has come up with ten surprising stories about Election ’08. Enjoy!

1.    Electoral Reform on the Ballot – New Victories and Implementations for Instant Runoff Voting:  This November’s ballot measures showed that Americans are ready to transform our politics. Landslide majorities voted for spoiler-free, majority elections through instant runoff voting (IRV) in Memphis, Tennessee (71% - see www.yesonfive.org) and Telluride, Colorado (67%), which extends a nearly unbroken string of wins for IRV in ballot measures since 2002. Meanwhile, an opportunity to win the ranked choice form of proportional representation lost in Cincinnati (see www.eightisgreat.com)after a late infusion of opposition money and deceptive advertising dropped the majority support won among early voters down to 47%. Other FairVote-endorsed reforms won with more than 70% of the vote in Maryland (for early voting) and Connecticut (for 17-year-old primary voting), while redistricting reform won in California.

Instant runoff voting had a terrific first election in Pierce County, Washington, accommodating a full range of voter choice in a high-turnout general election. If early returns hold up, the system will elect the first women county executive in the state’s history, with her victory dependent on the preferences of the third and fourth place candidates that vaulted her from second into first. San Francisco also held its fifth set of IRV elections; local press lauded the impact it had in reducing the degree of negative attacks that too often dominate our politics.

Stay tuned for major reforms in the coming year that we expect can be won in legislatures and on the ballot. The nation had learned a lot about why we need to care about electoral rules and mechanics. Now is the time for action.

2.    The 2008 Spoiler Effect – Key Non-Majority Winners (and non-winners): Speaking of instant runoff voting, despite the decisive and incontestable victory of, the spoiler problem again showed the need for IRV. Minor party candidacies had a major impact on several races:

* Even with Barack Obama’s strong national numbers and the low vote totals for minor party and independent presidential candidates, electoral votes in three states and one congressional district were won over the opposition of most voters in that jurisdiction. Obama’s 49.9% of the vote in Indiana defeated John McCain by a margin less than Libertarian Bob Barr’s 1.1%. Obama won North Carolina with 49.7% of the vote (Barr won 0.59%), while McCain carried Missouri with only 49.4% of the votes (where Obama won 49.2 % and Ralph Nader 0.6%). Obama also looks likely to pick up an electoral vote by taking Nebraska’s second congressional district with less than 50%.

* Nine U.S. House seats were elected with less (and sometimes far less) than a majority of the vote, including Ohio’s Second district that was won with only 45%.

*  The Senate had several non-majority results. In Oregon, Democrat Jeff Merkley will win narrowly with less than 49% of the vote, while Republican Ted Stevens looks likely to be re-elected in Alaska with a similar vote-share. In Minnesota, where fully 14 of the last 20 statewide races have been won with less than 50%, Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley won 437,377 votes (15%) and two other candidates won more than 20,000 votes in an election in which incumbent Republican Norm Coleman leads his Democratic challenger Al Franken by merely 326 votes – they are now going to a recount. IRV would have given the backers of Barkley and the other third party candidates a way in choosing between the frontrunners, both of whom won less than 42% of the vote.
Meanwhile, Georgia requires its Members of Congress to win a majority of the vote, and incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss leads with 49.8% in a race where Libertarian Allen Buckley won 3.1%. Chambliss will face Democrat Jim Martin in a December 2nd runoff. Turnout is sure to plunge from Georgia’s record participation this week, and the candidates and their backers will spend millions. IRV would have given us a clean winner on election night.

3.    Closer Than You Think – How McCain Could Have Won While Losing by Seven Million Votes:  Barack Obama apparently has won 365 electoral votes (if he picks up Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district), which is 95 votes more than needed to win. He also has won a comfortable majority of the national popular vote, defeating John McCain by more than seven million votes. But remarkably a shift of less one-third of a percent of all votes cast would have elected McCain.

Thanks to the current Electoral College system, our President is elected through 56 separate contests (50 states, five congressional districts and the District of Columbia), rather than a single nationwide contest. A shift of fewer than 398,615 votes in seven states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado, and New Hampshire) would have given Sen. McCain a majority of 273 electoral votes.

Indeed, in five of the last 12 elections, relatively small shifts of votes would have elected the second-place winner.  In 1976, for example, shifts of 3,687 votes in Hawaii and 5,559 votes in Ohio would have resulted in a win for Gerald Ford despite Jimmy Carter’s 1.7 million national lead. Similarly, in 2004, a shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio would have nullified President Bush’s 3.5 million-vote lead nationwide and elected John Kerry.

4.    The Electoral College Swing State Map Grew Smaller, Not Larger – The Real Presidential Partisan Geography: Despite many pundits’ claims that the Electoral College map has been redrawn, this election in fact reduced the number of swing states in a nationally even year. A state is only a true swing state when it has a real chance to decide the election. This year, Barack Obama won by 6% nationally, allowing him to win states like North Carolina and Indiana that he didn’t need to win – and that he would not have won in a nationally even contest this year.

The biggest changes in the underyling partisanship of states have been states moving further into the non-competitive realm, with the number of competitive states (partisanship between 47% and 53%) dwindling. By our partisan measures that are remarkably accurate predictors of likely swing states four years before an election, only 11 states are now likely to be competitive in a 50-50 year in 2012, down from 13 after 2004,16 after 2000 and 33 after 1976. Of the 13 states with the most competitive partisanship, 11 are repeats from 2004, with Indiana and North Carolina moving into competitive range and Michigan and New Mexico shifting to a pronounced Democratic tilt. The great majority of states did not shift their partisanship definition by more than 3%; the biggest movers were two non-swing states, Hawaii (moving decidedly toward Democrats and their home state candidate Obama) and Arkansas (moving sharply toward Republicans)

Look for FairVote’s updated Presidential Election Inequality report to come out by early next year. We will also use information from our Presidential Candidate Tracker (www.fairvote.org/tracker) that showed that the candidates held 99% of their campaign events in 17 states.

5.    Making History (or not) - Stagnant Representation of Women and People of Color: In this year’s presidential election, the candidacies of African American Barack Obama, Latino Bill Richardson and women Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin captured the imagination of millions of Americans. Sen. Obama of course became the first person of color ever elected president. But that excitement did not translate into notable gains for diversity in congressional and gubernatorial races:

·    In the Senate, no new people of color won – and the Senate will again have no African Americans if the Illinois governor does not select an African American to replace Obama. Two women won (Kay Hagan in North Carolina and Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire), but there is only a net gain for women of only one seat, making the Senate 83% male.

·    In the House, there was a net gain of only two women – notching women up 0.5% to 16.5%. There were no gains for African Americans and an increase of one Latino, with Ben Lujan’s victory in New Mexico.

·   Women defeated men in the two close gubernatorial elections, but there was no net gain for women in governor’s mansions.

·    Women did win a remarkable seven statewide offices in North Carolina, while, according to the invaluable analysts at the National Conference of State Legislatures (http://ncsl.typepad.com/the_thicket/), the New Hampshire state senate became the first woman-majority state legislative chamber in our nation’s history. On the other hand, the South Carolina state senate became the first legislative chamber to not have a single woman representative since 1991, and the share of women in state legislatures stayed flat at 23.7% — less than 3% higher than it was in 1993.

Women defeated men in the two close gubernatorial elections, but there was no net gain for women in governor’s mansions. Women did win a remarkable seven statewide offices in North Carolina, however, and the New Hampshire state senate became the first woman-majority state legislative chamber in our nation’s history.

6.    Dubious Democracy – The Power of Incumbency Lives On in No-Choice House Races: FairVote’s Dubious Democracy and Monopoly Politics series of reports on congressional elections have played a key role in generating public awareness of the appalling lack of meaningful voter choice in U.S. House races and how partisan imbalance in districts is the key role in determining most winners. This year again showed the overwhelming power of incumbency, with only a handful of incumbent defeats despite “change” being this year’s campaign mantra. Most incumbents won overwhelming victories, with the average victory margin again sure to top 30% and be far beyond the impact of potential changes in redistricting practices or campaign finance laws. Indeed only one reform would give every voter a meaningful choice in House races in every election: replacing winner-take-all elections with a form of proportional representation, as has become the international norm.

As one measure of the frozen nature of U.S. House races, our Monopoly Politics model allows us to project winners in the great majority of upcoming U.S. House races as soon as we know the presidential and congressional results in each district in the previous election— with our projections only modified by whether a seat becomes open and by what is projected to be the national two-party partisan division. This year our model projected 157 Members who were not expected to face serious challenges in either a strongly Republican year (55% Republican) or strongly Democratic year (55% Democratic). All of these Members indeed were re-elected, and only 11 did not win by landslides of at least 20%.

7.    Voter Turnout and the Swing State Effect – Why Turnout Dropped in Many States: For years, pundits have argued that young people don’t make a difference in elections, but sure wasn’t true in 2008. The organization CIRCLE (www.civicyouth.org) estimates that young people made up a sixth of voters on Tuesday, with somewhere between 22 and 24 million voting – at least a 2.2 million increase from 2004.

This election had the highest overall voter turnout in an American election since at least 1964 — with a lowball estimate of 62.6%, with ballots still being counted. But our turnout will still be lower than most other well-established democracies, and even that overall rise can be misleading. According to preliminary data, nearly a third of our states (16) experienced a decline in turnout this year. Fourteen of these states were ignored in the presidential race as non-battlegrounds; the only battlegrounds with lower turnout are Pennsylvania and New Mexico. These results are consistent with CIRCLE’s findings in 2004, when eligible voters under 30 were a third more likely to vote in the ten closest states than in the rest of the nation.

This fall, FairVote conducted field research throughout Maryland to determine the most effective tactics to increase youth participating. Results will be released this winter, but in the meantime you can find more information about FairVote’s student voting curriculum at fairvote.org/learningdemocracy. To find complete turnout information for 2008, visit George Mason University Professor Michael McDonald’s website (elections.gmu.edu).

8.    Winner-Take-All in the Northeast – A New Era of Democratic Domination: In the last dozen years, Democrats have won sweeping victories in the Northeast, with the region’s Republican Party now on life-support. After the1992 elections, Republicans in New England and New York collectively held 20 of 54 U.S. House seats and held at least one House or Senate seat in every state. The intervening years for Republicans in the region have been devastating, especially in 2006 and 2008. New England’s last Republican House member, Chris Shays of Connecticut, was defeated this week, and Republicans now hold only 3 of 29 seats in New York and no Senate or House seats in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

The shift has affected down ballot races as well, in both New England and broader swathes of the Northeast. In 2006 Democrats took control of both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature, and this year took control of the New York Senate for the first time in four decades, gained monopoly control in Delaware and greatly expanded their margins in state legislatures throughout the region.

9.    Cleansing Republicans from Democratic House Districts – The Roots of Polarization in Congress Lie in Voters and Winner-Take-All Rules: Each federal election cycle, FairVote projects U.S. House results (www.fairvote.org/mp) based on the impact of incumbency and which party holds a partisan advantage in each Congressional district as determined by the relative performance of the major party candidates in that district compared to their national average. First developed in 1997, our measure of partisanship was adapted by Charlie Cook for his partisan index. Our initial report that year showed just how powerful the role of district partisanship held. After the 1996 election, of the 82 districts that were at least 59% Republican, Democrats held four. Of the 98 districts that were at least 59% Democratic, Republicans held only one.

Since that time we have seen just how powerful the role of partisanship is in determining which party wins open seats. This year, for example, out of 33 open seats with decisive results, there were 29 went to a candidate with the party that would be expected to win in a 54% Democratic year, including eight of the ten Democratic gains. We also have seen partisanship as the most reliable predictor of where incumbents will lose.

Today, after two consecutive strong elections for Democrats, the impact of partisanship can perhaps be most clearly shown by the steep decline in Democratic districts. After the 1996 elections, Republicans held 37 of the 189 districts with a Democratic partisanship, including more than a third of the 91 districts with a Democratic partisanship between 50% and 58%. Today, however, Republicans hold only ten of the 199 districts that now lean Democratic. Democrats indeed hold all of the 146 most  Democratic districts, including every single district that is more than 55% Democratic, and hold all but four of the 177 districts that are more than 51.6% Democratic (with one of those seats still possibly shifting Democratic this year if Dave Reichert loses in Washington State). Of the 44 districts that Republicans held in 2005 in districts that were at least 47.4% Democratic, they now hold just 18.

Democrats today are doing somewhat better in Republican terrain, but watch out – if there is any comparable national toward Republicans in 2010, expect a wipeout of dozens of Democrats in such “red” districts. Republicans have the advantage over Democrats of being able to win a majority of the U.S. House without winning a singe district that is less than 52% Republican.

These numbers tell an important story for those seeking less partisan voting patterns in our legislatures. Many of the Republicans who have lost in Democratic districts were particularly respected by moderates, such ahs Maryland’s Connie Morella, Iowa’s Jim Leach and Connecticut’s Chris Shays. What overpowered them was the combination of winner-take-all elections and voters growing more consistent in their voting patterns. The fact is that the crosscutting representatives that some pundits like to extol are less likely to come from competitive districts as from the other party’s districts. And it is those representatives who are not surviving in today’s highly charged partisan climate.

The only remedy for electing people from the minority party in a majority party’s terrain is a form of proportional representation. One modest example had a highly positive impact in Illinois, where in three seat state legislative districts it took just over a quarter of the vote to win a seat in elections from 1870 to 1980. That system opened the door regularly to the kind of crosscutting representatives who are increasingly unlikely to win today.]

10.    Democrats Winning Control of the Process – A Near-Sweep of Secretary of State Races: Throughout the 2008 cycle, FairVote has tracked Secretary of State races because of that office’s critical role in most states in proposing and administering election policy. This year, six states’ chief election officials were up for election, and it’s likely that Democratic women candidates will win five of them. The results are as follows:

-    West Virginia — Natalie Tennant (D)
-    Oregon — Kate Brown (D)
-    Montana — Linda McCulloch (D) leads incumbent Brad Johnson (R) 49%-48% in a raced still too close to call
-    Missouri — Robin Carnahan (D)
-    Vermont — Incumbent Deb Markowitz (D)
-    Washington — Incumbent Sam Reed (R)

FairVote hopes to work with these (and other) officials throughout their term to debate and implement electoral reforms and improve election administration throughout the country. For more on Secretaries of State and our surveys this year of county election officials that were published in five reports on local preparedness and uniformity in election administration, visit www.fairvote.org/sosresearch

Cross-posted at Rhode Island’s Future.

One objection that’s sometimes raised about youth voter pre-registration in Rhode Island’s General Assembly is that young voters are apathetic, and they won’t take advantage of pre-registration even if we implement it.

Since pre-registration would cost next to nothing, I’ve never understood what the point of this argument is. Especially since the data from Florida (where pre-registration was recently started) seem to show a significant increase in youth turnout due to pre-registration.

The think tank CIRCLE estimates that the percentage of youths turning out was up by as much as 6% over the 2004 fraction and 13% over 2000

And yes, those younger voters broke overwhelmingly for President-elect Obama, by a 2-to-1 margin. That probably played a decisive role in several close swing states (like my home state of Indiana).

Before Democrats start getting too cocky about their “emerging majority,” they should remember that neither major political party has historically owned this demographic bloc. A host of unique factors–including the Obama campaign’s groundbreaking use of the internet–combined to make this election unlike any ever seen before. According to CIRCLE,

Young voters favored the winner of this election by more than a two-to-one margin, forming a major part of the winning coalition. Overall, voters chose Obama over McCain by a much narrower margin of about 52% to 46%. This gap in presidential choice by age is unprecedented. The average gap from 1976 through 2004 was only 1.8 percentage points, as young voters basically supported the same candidate as older voters in most elections.

Obama’s dominance among young voters was yet another exception in his historic, rule-breaking run

In stark contrast to the elections of 2000 and 2004, President-elect Barack Obama won yesterday’s election with no questions asked. He took 364 electoral votes (assuming North Carolina settles in his favor), 94 votes more than he needed to reach the magic threshold of 270 electoral votes, and he carried a comfortable majority of the popular vote with a 7,351,967-vote lead over Sen. McCain.

However, a shift of fewer than 400,000 votes, or about 0.33% of all votes cast, could have changed the outcome of the election dramatically, swinging the title of President-elect over to Sen. McCain.

Thanks to the Electoral College, our President is elected through 56 separate contests (50 states, five congressional districts and the District of Columbia), rather than a single nationwide contest. Most of these contests are not competitive—the so-called “safe states” are already in the bank for one candidate or the other before the campaigns even begin. But a handful of contests are in highly competitive battleground states. In each of these states, the candidates can bolster their Electoral College vote totals by winning a slim majority of the statewide popular vote. As we learned in 2000, this can result in a President-elect who does not win the national popular vote. That year a few hundred votes swung the state of Florida, and its 27 electoral votes, to George W. Bush, electing himas the 43rd President of the United States.

In yesterday’s election, a shift of fewer than 400,000 votes in the states of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado, and New Hampshire would have given Sen. McCain 273 electoral votes, just enough to send him to the White House. Based on the latest figures from the New York Times, Sen. McCain would need to shift just over half of the following vote totals to win the election:

State / Popular vote difference

OH / 206270
FL / 189777
VA / 155627
IN / 26163
NC / 12163
CO / 142196
NH / 65020

Total / 797216

Shift necessary to reverse election - 398,615

In North Carolina, for example, to reverse Obama’s narrow win and secure its 15 electoral votes, Sen. McCain would have needed to shift only 6,082 voters to his side.  Similar shifts in the remaining states would have delivered us yet another Electoral College-winner who had lost the national popular vote.

This election did not result in a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, but it came dangerously close. In five of the last 12 elections, a similar shift of a handful of votes would have elected the second-place winner, though in these cases that shift need only occur in one or two states. In 1976, for example, a shift of 3,687 votes in Hawaii and 5,559 votes in Ohio would have resulted in a victory for Gerald Ford, regardless of Jimmy Carter’s 1.7 million-vote lead nationwide. Similarly, in 2004, a shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio would have nullified President Bush’s 3.5 million-vote lead nationwide and elected John Kerry.

If Sen. McCain had pulled off these marginal shifts, Obama’s 7.3 million vote lead nationwide would not be able to protect him from the nasty side effects of the Electoral College.

These close calls occur all too often, as do wrong-winner elections (which should never occur!). This is why we must push to enact the National Popular Vote interstate compact by 2012, to eliminate these 51 separate contests and institute a single nationwide election for the leader of our country.