In an effort to facilitate voter registration, more and more countries are allowing mail-in voter registration. With technology advances, in some systems this is being extended to e-mail and fax registration. This is boosting voter registration but has raised concerns about
ineligible or nonexistent persons registering, or eligible voters registering multiple times.
In New Zealand, for example, these concerns are addressed by revisions of the voters lists at regular intervals. The
Registrar of Elections sends a form to every registered voter asking for corrections. If the form is
not returned, the voter is taken off of the lists.
In the case of the U.S., a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), allows for mail-in
registration, despite the concerns raised by state electoral managers over the difficulties in protecting
against fraudulent applications. The NVRA provides a standard mail-in registration form that
can be used anywhere in the United States.
The primary concern by the U.S. states is the lack of a control mechanism in mail-in voter
registration to ensure that the mail-in applicant is eligible. Several states are currently designing
state legislation to add control mechanisms. For example, the Secretary of State for Arkansas has
proposed reforming the state election law to increase the county clerk's ability to verify a voter's
eligibility. These reforms would require comparison and verification of signatures, and voting for
the first time in person at a polling site for someone who applies to register to vote by mail. 143
Despite these concerns, the U.S. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) reported to the U.S.
Congress that in the first two years of mail-in registration, it found only a 5.2 percent duplication
rate. Two-thirds of these were new registrations, and the remaining third were from changes of
name and address.144
According to the FEC Report:
The mail registration provisions of the NVRA caused relatively few problems for the
States and accounted for nearly one-third of all voter registration applications from 1995
through 1996. ... Motor vehicle registration provisions of NVRA appeared to be the
easiest for states to implement and .... also yielded the highest volume of registration
applications among the various agencies mandated by the NVRA, accounting for 33.1% of
the total number of registration applications in the U.S. during 1995 and 1996.145
The FEC also recommended a number of changes to improve the NVRA, including:
- requiring part of the social security number for all registered voters;
- developing and implementing a statewide computerized voter registration database, and
- ensuring that all local registration offices are computerized and linked to the computerized
systems of the state collateral agencies relevant to the NVRA (motor vehicle office, public
assistance offices, etc); creating of a new class of mail for 'official election material' with the
most favourable rates; and providing free space in postal lobbies for voter registration materials. 146
