The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is circulating a draft policy paper about universal voter registration, and it’s pretty interesting. This system would place the onus of registering to vote on the government, not the individual, by requiring municipalities, states and perhaps even Washington to reach out to all eligible voters with a way to register — rather than the other way around. (more…)
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Jen Rehill, the Bureau Chief of WITF Public Radio Capitol News reported earlier this month that a large influx of new voter registrations was creating a backlog for the state of Pennsylvania, throwing into question when and how the votes of these new voters would be counted.
Rehill filed an update to her story on Friday, and it looks as though officials in Pennsylvania are confident the registrations have been processed, the new voters will appear in the local poll books and be able to cast ballots that will be counted in a timely fashion. From WITF:
Many county officials had voiced concerns about two weeks ago that tens of thousands of new and party-change registrations were stuck in the statewide voter registration system awaiting verification. They were worried large numbers of new voters would have to cast provisional ballots. State Elections Commissioner Harry Van Sickle says that concern is greatly diminished now, since all of the applications have now been verified and returned to the counties.
Van Sickle says there still may be a larger than usual number of voters requesting such ballots — because some people sent in applications after the March 24th deadline or made mistakes on their application form. Unfortunately Van Sickle says the votes would not count, even if they do use a provisional ballot.
Here’s audio from Rehill’s interview with Van Sickle:
In Rehill’s piece, Van Sickle doesn’t discuss another potential Election Day issue in the Keystone State that we have been looking into here, trouble with touch-screen voting machines.
Why Tuesday? is an effort to make America’s democracy stronger through increased voter participation. We work to make election reform an issue that our politicians cannot afford to avoid.
