Election-day registration brings greater turnout

There is a really bad bill still alive in the Montana Legislature. House Bill 281 seeks to end (after one try) Montana's new system of election-day registration in which any qualified voter, upon showing proper identification, may register and then vote on election day.

In 2006, Montana joined six other states in allowing same-day registration. And despite the fact that these others states, which include Minnesota, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Idaho, have reported no difficulty in managing election-day registration nor any evidence of electoral fraud, we are now told that Montana's county election officials can't manage it.

No fraud found

It's hard to imagine that the 26 walk-ins in Custer County or the 159 in Ravalli County were too much to handle. Then we have had Secretary of State Brad Johnson raising the chimera of possible election fraud. But in Montana. all voters have to show proper identification to vote in the precinct or the county courthouse. It should therefore be no surprise that not one person has been indicted for fraudulent election-day registration in 2006 in this state or any other state.

Finally, we are told that election-day registrants must be less informed, lazy or too uncaring to register 30 days before the election. In Bozeman, several of my students waited in line from three to five hours for the chance to register and then vote on election day. Anyone who does this is clearly motivated and informed and ready to vote.

In Montana, a grand total of 3,947 individuals were walk-in registrants on election day, slightly less than 1 percent of all the votes cast. In the hotly contested U.S. Senate race incumbent Conrad Burns was bested by challenger Jon Tester by 3,562 votes. Could it be that the Republican secretary of state's support for repeal of election-day registration has an unstated partisan motive based upon the misreading of the accidental closeness of these two numbers and assuming a causal link between the two because of that closeness?

The simple fact of the matter is that politicians calculate possible advantages and disadvantages in any reform that makes registration and voting more citizen-friendly. I believe that is what is really going on here. But there is little empirical support for those partisan calculations of advantage in the research of political scientists like myself and others regarding the effects of election-day registration. For example, sociologist Jack Gilchrist and I published our research in a journal of the American Political Science Association showing that neither party benefitted from election-day walk-in registration in Minnesota, and not surprisingly, the people most inclined to take advantage were the more mobile, the better educated and the young.

Encouraging young voters

It should, therefore, surprise no one that the biggest number of walk-in voters were in Gallatin (419) and Missoula (632) counties. Both are continuing to experience high levels of population growth, and both have the highest concentration of young people between 18 and 24. Absent clear evidence of fraud, do we want Montana's young people stripped of this opportunity to vote? And all Montanans should reject repeal of election-day registration based upon the unstated and unsupported assumption about how university students might have voted last November. In the 2006 election, Montana ranked third in turnout among the 50 states. That is something to be proud of.

In the meantime, the secretary of state and the county officials who felt so overwhelmed might travel to nearby Minnesota and see how they have done it without a hitch since 1974.

Jerry W. Calvert is a professor of political science at Montana State University in Bozeman and has written about voter turnout, election law procedures and the initiative and referendum process.