Actually Good News About Voting, for a Change
Updated at 8:29 p.m. ET on July 7, 2022
In 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country, many states altered their election systems to try to ease voting. Since then, some of those states, especially Republican-led ones, have aggressively reversed course, taking steps to make voting harder.
This sort of bad news has overshadowed one of the more interesting and encouraging changes in the country. Starting in May 2020, Colorado modified its registration system so that anyone who gets a new driver’s license and provides proof of citizenship is now automatically registered to vote. The state then sends people a postcard informing them of their registration and offering them a chance to opt out. by two Stanford University political scientists shows that the new approach has made a significant difference: more than 200,000 new registered voters in the 16 months through September 2021, in a state where about 3.3 million votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election.
