My electionline.org colleague Mindy Moretti has an info-packed story in this week’s electionlineWeekly on the push to get voters registered before deadlines start to hit in early October. Her story covers a variety of items, but the ones that jumped out at me were the online voter registration (OVR) numbers for states who have recently begun the practice. These two grafs stood out in particular:
In Maryland, the [OVR] system launched in July and has seen more than 8,000 new registrants and more than 14,000 people have updated their registration….
…
Since its launch in August, 9,716 New Yorkers have used the [online] voter registration system to update their registration or complete an application. According to [the State Board’s Doug] Kellner, 3,168 are new registrants.
In other words, more than 60% of Marylanders and about two-thirds of New Yorkers using OVR have done so not to register for the first time but to update their records to reflect changes of address or other important information. That’s more than 20,000 voters in those two states combined who likely won’t need to cast a provisional ballot or endure other address-related delays on Election Day. We don’t yet have similar data from other OVR states – now including California, which reports that over 19,000 voters used its OVR system in its first day online – but I’d be very surprised if the percentages weren’t similar.
Full Article: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation: Online Voter Registration’s Impact on Existing Voters – Election Academy.