EDITORIAL: Motor voter law a celebration of apathy

The Observer, La Grande, Ore.
·2 min read

May 11—Some Oregon lawmakers boast about the percentage of eligible Oregonians who are registered to vote, even though the tactic the state employs to bolster the numbers takes advantage of citizens' apathy rather than their interest in elections.

More boasting, and apathy, could be coming.

The basic idea here is to plumb state records to identify nonvoters, then send each a postcard stating they will be registered to vote unless they decide to continue to keep ballots from cluttering their mailboxes.

It started in 2016 with the "motor voter law."

People who aren't registered to vote and who go to the DMV to renew their driver's license or take care of some other business — business that the state requires — will get one of those postcards.

If they don't respond within 14 days and decline to be registered, they're automatically added to the voter rolls.

And if they don't choose a party affiliation, they're registered as nonaffiliated.

Now some legislators want to implement the same method to register voters using records from the Oregon Health Plan rather than DMV documents.

The Oregon House last week passed House Bill 2107. The legislation now goes to the Senate.

The Oregon Elections Division doesn't track voter turnout among people who were registered through the motor voter law.

But statistics do show that the vast majority of people enrolled under the law do not choose a political party — 88% of the 274,000 who were registered under the law in its first year, 2016, and 86% in 2017.

This is largely responsible for the major rise in the number of nonaffiliated voters in Oregon, a category growing much more rapidly than Democrat or Republican voters.

It can't be disputed that more Oregonians are voting as a result of the motor voter law.

But fans of this tactic oversell it. Generally left unmentioned is that a significant number of these Oregonians, having been in effect handed a ballot by the government, treat it with about as much respect as most of us give to those fabulous credit card offers that arrive with the magazines and the water bill.