Changing the narrative on the right to vote

U.S. citizens do not have to exert any effort to register to have the Bill of Rights protect them.

Registration is not required to have and exercise our rights to free speech, to religious freedom, to a jury trial or to be free from warrantless searches.

With these foundational rights being automatic, why should we have to register to vote in order to exercise the right that is the core of our democracy?

Why isn’t voter registration automatic when a person reaches 18 or an immigrant becomes a citizen?

States should bear the burden to show that an individual is not entitled to vote, rather than place the burden on us to prove our entitlement to vote.

We need to reverse the way we have looked at voting and the efforts of to restrict voting.

Earlier, Texas made voting easy — to vote, men needed only to be a resident with the intent to become a citizen.

Yet, those people not eligible to vote — women and minorities — had to wage lengthy struggles to vote. And minorities had to overcome race-based restrictions.

The civil rights era yielded the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which removed many impediments burdening minority citizens’ franchise.

Unfortunately, certain state governments are taking us backward by asserting the notion they can restrict the right to vote.

They shout “fraud” as justification, although their best evidence is only a few infinitesimal incidents that would never affect any electoral outcome.

Not only should voter registration be automatic, but we should advocate for and facilitate the voting process.

What legitimate reason exists not to have weekend voting, so that working people don’t have to scramble home and then to the polls?

Likewise, providing two weeks or more of early voting makes the process easier regardless of a voter’s circumstances (children, travel, illness, etc.).

And why not have online voting? If we can conduct myriad secure bank transactions online, why not vote online?

And perhaps voting should be mandatory, as it is in 20 other countries, to increase turnout. If citizens want to benefit from a democracy, voting should be their responsibility.

Oregon, which conducts elections by mail only and has one of the highest percentages of registered voters in the nation (73 percent), just enacted a law that ensures that everyone interacting with its motor vehicle department since 2013 will automatically receive ballots.

This simple, inclusive process will add some 300,000 voters to the rolls.

If Texas followed Oregon’s lead, it could add approximately 5 million voters to the rolls, according to data from the Texas secretary of state.

The percentage of Texas registered voters is now lower than it was in 2008. Texas consistently has one of the country’s lowest election turnouts.

A 2013 report on human rights by the Texas Civil Rights Project shows that the secretary of state and school districts around Texas have been derelict in their legal duty to offer voter registration to high school students who would be of age to vote in the following November election.

That report indicates that as many as 400,000 eligible students were not offered the opportunity to register to vote in a span of 1 1/2 years.

Automatic voter registration and easier voting opportunities could go far toward resolving these problematic issues and others that the Texas Legislature gratuitously created (such as tightfisted ID requirements).

Taking reasonable, secure and fair actions to register people to vote automatically and creating numerous opportunities to cast a vote would make the false fear of fraud irrelevant.

Much has changed in the 218 years since the U.S. Constitution’s adoption, including our political philosophy about democracy. One profound change has been expanding the franchise and eliminating barriers of race, sex and class.

The franchise is a fundamental right, and the state should do everything in its power to protect the right to vote, rather than erecting barriers and discouraging participation in civil society.

We must move forward, not backward, in allowing and promoting the free exercise of the most democratic of all citizen actions — voting.

James C. Harrington is director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. Jimmy Alan Hall is an Austin attorney.

This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Changing the narrative on the right to vote."