Connecticut: Merrill Announces Voter Registration Partnership With AAA | CT News Junkie

With the Nov. 3 municipal elections approaching, Connecticut residents have new options when it comes to registering to vote: their local AAA offices. Secretary of the State Denise Merrill this week launched a partnership with AAA in which 14 AAA branch offices are offering voter registration services. To register to vote, eligible residents can fill out a voter registration card at their local AAA branch. The cards then will be shipped to the state Department of Motor Vehicles for processing, or voters can choose to mail the cards directly to their registrar of voters, according to Merrill.

Editorials: How Automatic Voter Registration Can Transform American Politics | Ari Berman/The Nation

n July 1976, while appearing with civil-rights icon John Lewis, Jimmy Carter proposed automatically registering to vote every eligible American once they turned 18, which he said would “transform, in a beneficial way, the politics of our country.” Carter’s ambitious plan never became law, but 39 years later, states like Oregon and California are embracing automatic voter registration as a bold new voting reform, potentially adding millions of new voters to the rolls. It’s a trend that warrants more attention, especially as the country celebrates National Voter Registration Day today. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and National Voter Registration Act of 1993 enfranchised millions of new voters. After passage of the VRA, for example, the number of black registered voters in the South increased from 31 percent to 73 percent. Despite these landmark laws, 51 million Americans—1 in 4 eligible voters—are still not registered to vote. “Among eligible voters, some 30 percent of African Americans, 40 percent of Hispanics, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 41 percent of young adults (age 18-24), were not registered to vote in the historic 2008 election,” according to Demos.

National: Presidential Proclamation on National Voter Registration Day | whitehouse.gov

The right to vote is a cornerstone of what it means to be a free people: It represents the bedrock tenets of equality and civic participation upon which our Nation was founded. Throughout American history, courageous patriots of every background and creed have fought to extend this right to all and to bring our country closer to its highest ideals. Voting is vital to a principle at the core of our democracy — that men and women of free will have the capacity to shape their own destinies. On National Voter Registration Day, we recommit to upholding this belief by encouraging all eligible Americans to register to vote and exercise this essential right.

Florida: National Voter Registration Day: Be election-ready — register to vote | The Tampa Tribune

Today is National Voter Registration Day, and we are encouraging all eligible Floridians to register to vote or update their registration if they have moved since the last election. September also is National Voter Registration Month, and we are asking Floridians to set aside just a few moments to register to vote, or if already registered, to go online and check that their registration information is correct and up to date. Once you have checked your status, if you are on Twitter, post a tweet with the hashtag #CelebrateNVRD and encourage your followers to do a check of their registration status. During the 2015 legislative session, the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections (FSASE) and the Bipartisan Policy Center worked together to educate the public and legislators on the nonpartisan policy advantages of Online Voter Registration (OVR).

Editorials: Why Tomorrow May Be the Most Important National Voter Registration Day Ever | Page Gardner/Huffington Post

Ever since we started the Voter Participation Center more than a decade ago, we’ve honored National Voter Registration Day. It’s always been an important day for us, but never more so than this year. That’s because in 2016, for the first time ever, people of color, young Americans and unmarried women will likely cast over half of all the ballots in the presidential election. Think about that. For the first time in our nation’s history, the most diverse electorate ever will enter voting booths on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. They will look more like the real America, and drive their own destinies. But the first step starts tomorrow, with National Voter Registration Day. At the Voter Participation Center, we are dedicated to increasing the civic engagement of unmarried women, people of color and Millennials–the three demographic groups who comprise the Rising American Electorate (RAE), also called the New American Majority. We have helped 2.6 million Americans register to vote in the last decade, and see a direct line between registration and voting. There are about 125 million eligible voters in the RAE, or 57% of the vote-eligible population in this country. A true majority. But as our new research with Lake Research Partners makes clear, we have heavy lifting to do to make sure that the RAE is voting–and registering–in proportion to their share of the population.