Election Day Registration: Giving All Americans a Fair Chance to Vote

By BROOKE LIERMAN

In 2005, Americans watched as Iraqis participated in their first “free and fair elections.”  Several months later in his State of the Union address, President Bush praised the Iraqi citizens who voted.  But in doing so, he failed to draw attention to an irony in America’s exportation of democracy: not only did Iraq have a higher turnout in its election than the United States did in 2004, but Iraq’s turnout was made possible in part by a U.S.-sponsored system of automatic voter registration, precisely the type of registration system that most states in the United States have refused to adopt. With the aid of U.S. supervisors and funding, Iraq has joined the host of other democracies that use automatic voter registration, while the United States remains one of the few democracies in the world that places the entire burden of voter registration on each individual citizen. Is it time for the United States to adopt some form of automatic registration to make more of its eligible voters part of the democratic process?

Click here to read more