In the last few weeks, potential voters in California have been able to register online for the first time, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow residents to register and vote on Election Day. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, and voting rights advocacy groups hope as many as five states might join them next year. Democratic lawmakers here described the legislation as a potential counterweight to Republican-backed laws in other parts of the country requiring photo identification to vote and making it more difficult to register. “It’s extremely important that as some states in the nation are moving to suppress voter turnout, California is moving forward to expand voter participation,” said Mike Feuer, a Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored the Election Day registration law. “I hope California is the catalyst for other states to encourage civic engagement and participation.” The changes in California are hardly revolutionary. Election Day registration, which is already in effect in eight states, began in the early 1970s in states like Maine and Wisconsin. Online registration has now expanded to more than a dozen states since it was first established, in Arizona in 2002. But conservative efforts to require people to show photo ID, a step they say is necessary to prevent voter fraud, seem to have galvanized some Democrats to try to expand ballot access — long an item on the party’s agenda, but one that had not been a top priority in recent years in many states. In May, Connecticut became the first state in five years to approve Election Day registration. When he signed the bill into law, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement, “Despite the pervasive climate across the U.S. to restrict voting rights, Connecticut has moved in the opposite direction.” Demos, a nonprofit organization that has worked to expand ballot access since the contested 2000 presidential election, has identified five additional states — Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and West Virginia — where they hope to pass Election Day registration laws next year. In each of those states, Democrats control the governorship and at least one chamber of the legislature. Voter registration laws were not always so infused with partisan politics. In the 1990s, Republican strongholds like Idaho and Wyoming instituted Election Day registration. The National Conference of State Legislatures says that while little evidence of in-person voter fraud has been found, voter turnout in states with Election Day registration has been at least 10 percent higher than in states without it. “Historically, this kind of work has been supported by Republican and Democratic states,” said Steven Carbó, state advocacy director for Demos. “There is no objective reason why we can’t be back at that point.” Online registration has retained some measure of bipartisan support. The South Carolina Legislature unanimously approved it this year (although, in California, the vote broke along strict party lines). But Election Day registration has become the exclusive province of Democrats. Since 1996, only four states have approved Election Day registration, and in each case it was a Democratic governor who signed the bill into law. Republican lawmakers in Maine and Montana have tried unsuccessfully to repeal their longstanding Election Day registration laws. Mr. Feuer’s bill passed through the State Assembly with no Republican support. “I think this really leaves the California voting system wide open to fraud,” said Connie Conway, the Republican leader in the State Assembly. Mr. Feuer argued that both the online and Election Day registration laws included strong safeguards against voter fraud. Online registration will be an option only for residents who already have a California ID, and the Election Day registration law enhances penalties for fraud, and allows those who register that day to cast only provisional ballots. Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “The Voting Wars,” said that neither side’s ostensible rationale for pushing changes to voting laws should be taken entirely at face value. Republicans, he said, have advocated for ID requirements in part to restrict the number of voters from the other party, since many population groups whose members tend to lack photo IDs also tend to vote Democratic. Democrats, meanwhile, have opposed all efforts to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls, which he called “a relatively small problem, but a real problem, and one that in the off-season needs to be corrected.” “On both sides there is the official story, and then the realpolitik,” Mr. Hasen said. That is the one thing that just about everyone agrees on. “Has it gotten more politicized?” Ms. Conway said. “Oh yeah.”
