Public Benefit from Online Voter Registration?

Some feedback on a couple recent blogs showed that I didn’t do such a great job on defining how our OVR work creates public benefit. So let me try again, with thanks to a canny reader who pointed out the subtlety involved.

But first, let me restate what our OVR work is: online voter registration assistance technology for NGOs like RockTheVote and government organizations like state and local boards of election. Through our work with RockTheVote, a large and expanding number of good government groups and other NGOs can quickly get an OVR system of their own, without deploying software or operating computers; and some can take advantage of options to largely re-work the appearance of the OVR web application, and/or integrate with mobile clients and social media. We’re also helping drive registrants to the government organizations as well, for those states with a strong online voter registration systems, who have requested that the Rocky OVR system give users the option of registering with the state board of elections. Then, out at the bleeding edge, it is even possible for local or state election officials to piggyback on the OVR system to have their own 100% election-official-managed online voter registration assistance system, with the same look and feel as other county or state web sites, and all without any procurement or deployment.

So, fair enough, we’re the technology provider in a mix of many organizations who either want to help people register to vote (NGOs) or are have a basic mission of helping people register — county registrars and state election officials. So where is the public benefit? And where is the subtlety that I mentioned? Many people would say that in a broad way, the public as a whole benefits when more eligible voters are registered and participate in elections — but not all. In fact, that is a political issue that we at OSDV want to steer clear of, especially given the political conflicts between some, who wish to aggressively register people in droves and who are more concerned about participation than eligibility, and others who are concerned about possible fraud and are more concerned about eligibility that participation. The debate about voter registration practices goes from one extreme where an election is tainted if it seems that a single eligible voter was barred from participation, to the the other extreme where an election is tainted if there is a suspicion about a single ineligible person having cast a ballot.

So where do public benefits arise separately from these political issues? In a word: access, from a citizen perspective; and duty, from an election official perspective. Every eligible citizen deserves and is entitled to access to elections. It is the duty of election officials to provide that access to the eligible citizens who demand access, and to fairly and expeditiously assess every request for eligibility. Whether or not one is a fan of voter registration drives, or of voter roll purging, there is this shared value: eligible citizens who are trying to participate in elections should not have the access blocked by election officials. Yet in many cases that does occur because well-meaning public officials simply lack the resources, staff, or budget to be responsive to citizen needs. In OSDV’s wheel-house, the lack that we address is lack of  election technology, or lack of an effective way to acquire and deploy relevant technology.

And the technology angle is particularly important for younger citizens, who have been using computers and smart phones for practically everything for their whole lives. And network and mobile technology is in fact appropriate for registration and all manner of other voter services — unlike voting which has unique anonymity and integrity requirements — and so people expect it. Many election officials use technology to help them more effectively carry out their duties, meeting those expectations —  including those relating to voter registration. But for other election officials, there is gap between what they need, and what they are actually able to do within limitations of budget, procurement, staff; or products that simply don’t provide the functions appropriate to their jurisdiction. So the gap has multiple dimensions, but across them all, government officials are doing less than they could, in performance of their duties to provide election access to those who are actively seeking it and are eligible.

So when we or anyone else helps to fill that gap with new or better or more available technology, then we have enabled public benefit: election officials can do more in spite of having less resources every year; entitled voters can vote; and thirdly and often overlooked, good government groups and watchdog agencies have more visibility to assess how well the election officials really are doing their job. And that third factor is quite important. Just look at the horror-show of suspicion, vituperation, conspiracy theory, litigation, and Internet-speed dis- or mis-information that spun up recently in Talahassee and Memphis and elsewhere, over removal of people from voter rolls. It may be that nefarious people really were rigging the poll books, or it may be the electronic voter records are in significant dis-array, or it may be voter record databases are antique and prone to administrative error. But we’ll never really know. Resource constrained election organizations, that run old election technology with demonstrated flaws, and little or no self-record-keeping, find it extremely difficult to demonstrate to interested and entitled observers, exactly what is going on inside the computers, when one of these election year firestorms brews up.

And when the firestorm is big enough, it essentially prevents election officials from delivering on a fundamental duty: performing accurate and trustworthy elections. In other words, those firestorms are also a detriment to public confidence in elections. We, in addition to helping election officials perform their duties, are also passionate about delivering technology that can help with the transparency that’s part of firestorm prevention, and reducing their public detriment.

And lastly that brings me to a related point for another day: how the technology that we’re developing now can help deliver that transparency, along with the improvement in the technical infrastructure for U.S. elections. The next chunk is still in the oven, but I really look forward to sharing it here, when it is fully baked.

— EJS