“Registration is a barrier to people participating in this process,” said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. Elections Oregon governor calls automatic voter registration a 'phenomenal success'

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said Friday that switching to a system of automatically registering voters has been a “phenomenal success” in her state, diversifying the electorate there and increasing registration among minorities, and less urban and less wealthy voters.

“Registration is a barrier to people participating in this process,” she said at POLITICO’s State Solutions Conference. “Voting is a fundamental right of being a citizen, and people across the country should have the ability to access this fundamental right without barriers like registration.”


The Democrat took a shot at critics of policies aimed at increasing voter turnout, saying pointedly: “I think the good news is, in Oregon, we actually want people to vote in our state.”

She called the implementation of automatic voter registration in 2015 a “phenomenal success,” though she said her administration is looking for ways to integrate it into state agencies in addition to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the system is housed now.

The initiative helped move Oregon from the bottom of state rankings for the number of people of color registered to vote to the second highest in the country, she said. She added that “the new voters under the automatic voter registration system … are less urban, they are less wealthy, and they are much more diverse than our typical voters that either register online or through the paper process.”

Brown also credited the initiative for increasing voter turnout in last year’s midterms from 43 percent to 60 percent, which she said could be backed up by data differentiating new automatically registered voters from the increased enthusiasm of Democrats last year.

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She said that automatic voter registration was something she’d like to see implemented across the country, though she cautioned that the best way to implement it could vary from state to state. It would create a net benefit, she argued, because the effort could allow more resources to be poured into other parts of the electoral process.

“We in the past spent millions of dollars, thousands of hours, people knocking on doors and registering voters. Those resources, that time and energy, can be better used to engage, empower and better educate our voters and that’s a really good thing,” she said.

Brown rejected the idea that automatic voter registration would benefit Democrats at the expense of Republicans.

She estimated that “the [party affiliation] numbers are on par with about the registration” and noted that the process doesn’t register new voters with party affiliation, which a voter would need to change manually in order to participate in the state’s closed primaries.

