Oregon has opened up a new front in the battle over voting rights in the US by enacting a unique law that will use digital technology to register hundreds of thousands of new voters.



Over the past four years, rightwing conservatives have dominated the debate over the country’s voting system, leading a nationwide drive to push back the gains of the civil rights era and restrict access to the polls among minority, elderly and young people.

But Oregon this week tacked dramatically in the opposite direction, its Democratic governor, Kate Brown, signing into law HB 2177, dubbed the “motor voter” act, which seeks to drag America’s arcane voting procedures into the modern age.

“It’s very encouraging that at a time when politicians all across the country are trying to manipulate the rules of the game so that some people can vote and some cannot, Oregon is moving forward to get many more eligible voters on the rolls,” said Myrna Pérez, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The new law makes use of the wealth of Oregonians’ data that is already stored digitally through driving licenses by the state’s department of motor vehicles (DMV). Any eligible person who takes out a driving license will have their information passed automatically to the state agency that registers voters.

The emphasis is on the new system’s automatic nature. Individuals will be given the choice not to register to vote, but the onus will switch so that they do not opt in to vote, but opt out of registering.

In turn, that shifts the burden of registering off the shoulders of individual voters and on to those of the government’s election officials.

“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to participate in our elections,” Brown said when the bill passed earlier this month.

Supporters of the law say that as many as 400,000 voters could be added to Oregon’s rolls of 2.2 million – many of whom already have their details stored on the DMV’s databases.

The elderly, the young, African Americans and poor people – who tend for a variety of reasons to appear in high numbers among the disenfranchised – are likely to benefit in particular from the reforms.

Advocates for a more technologically savvy and modern American way of voting hope that Oregon will inspire other states to emulate what it has done and build on it.

The Brennan Center is calling on states to go even further and use data held by several different government agencies, not just the DMV, to set up automatic registration of voters – a move that it believes could expand the size of the US electorate by 50 million people.

It is a sign of the partisan battles that still lie ahead, however, that Oregon’s “motor voter” law was fiercely opposed by the Republican party – whose state senators last week unanimously tried to scupper the changes. Such blanket resistance is likely to be replicated in other parts of the country, given the way that Republican state legislators in Texas, Nevada, Wisconsin and several other states have been pressing for more restrictive measures that would dampen down the size of the electoral rolls.

Oregon’s Republicans objected to HB 2177 on two main grounds: that it could encourage fraud by making it easier for undocumented migrants to register to vote; and that the transfer of personal data from the DMV to election officials carried privacy risks.

Supporters of the bill countered that since 2009 the DMV has required proof of citizenship for all would-be drivers – thus mitigating the fraud issue – while privacy protections for vulnerable people such as police officers and victims of domestic violence have also been included in the new arrangements.