Ellison Introduces National Same-Day Voter Registration Bill

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The Same Day Registration Act would let people register at the polling place on Election Day rather than requiring registration weeks or months ahead of time, as most states do.

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Same-day registration is already law in seven states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, plus the District of Columbia. Common Cause claims those states see voter-turnout rates as much as 7 percent higherthan others. North Dakota is the only state to do without voter registrationaltogether.

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Minnesota routinely leads the nation in voter turnout – usually over 70 percent. … Enacting a National Election Day Registration law would do for the nation what same day registration has done for our State – give a voice to all who want to vote.

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[I]n the six states that currently use election day registration, there is not an unusually high number of cases of voting fraud. In particular, we have interviewed local election officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin, especially in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Milwaukee areas, and have found only a handful of cases of fraud involving a very small number of votes over the last decade. This in our opinion is due not to the unique political cultures of these six states, but instead to the fact that these states have made substantial investments in minimizing the risks associated with election day registration. [...]

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We have been able to find no evidence that election jurisdictions that have election day registration have significantly higher costs per vote, so it is not clear that election day registration is necessarily more costly. Rather, election day registration simply moves much of the pre-election burden of registration tasks to the post-election period; that is, rather than having to expend resources in the registration period before the election to update databases, most of this work can occur after the election.