Millions of young voters can register on election day in 22 states and DC

Only 45% of 18-year-olds are registered nationwide

With the Nov. 3 midterm election about a week away, eligible voters in 22 states and Washington DC can still register on election day, according to Laura W Brill, founder and CEO of the non-partisan nonprofit Civics Center. In an opinion analysis published by The Guardian, Brill said voters who register this way may cast provisional ballots. She estimated that 1.7 million 18-year-olds live in those jurisdictions and that almost half have not yet registered. Brill said the Civics Center’s mission is to make voter registration a core part of high school.

Brill said candidates were ignoring millions of young Americans who could still cast a decisive ballot but had not yet registered. She said campaigns use voter files to identify registered regular voters who have not yet cast a ballot and then use targeted analysis to decide whether printing and postage are warranted for sending them political mail. She said unregistered 18-year-olds are unlikely to receive that outreach.

Brill said campaigns were wasting their money on her because she had voted and would have done so with or without glossy mailers. She said campaigns should instead target people who are probably more persuadable than she is and who are routinely ignored, including the millions of Americans who will be old enough to vote for the first time this November.

In California, she said nearly 300,000 eligible 18-year-olds can legally show up through election day and cast a provisional ballot. Those votes would count the same as other votes, she said.

Brill estimated that more than 1 million Californians ages 18 to 24 who have not registered and are therefore absent from voter files still have the right to vote on election day or during early voting. Their absence from the files, she said, leaves many of them outside the campaign outreach she described.

Brill said voter files show that only 45% of 18-year-old Americans are registered, compared with 82% of Americans over 45. She rejected what she described as an apathy-and-laziness explanation, arguing instead that young people often have not been asked to register or told how to do it and why participation matters. She said candidates were also among those who had not asked young people to register or explained how to do it and why participation matters.

Brill said more than half of US states allow eligible voters to cast provisional ballots on election day, during some or all of early voting, or both. Beyond the 22 states and Washington DC that allow election-day registration, she identified four other states where people who have not yet registered may cast provisional ballots during all or part of early voting: Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York and North Carolina. The provisional route is not available on election day itself.

Brill said election-day registration matters for first-time voters. She examined voter files in a sample of four states that allow election-day registration and found that each recorded far more 18-year-olds entering the voter file on the final day than on any other day of the year. She also said turnout correlates positively with allowing eligible voters who have not signed up in advance to vote.

Brill attributed the lower registration rate to a targeting cycle: young people have low registration rates and therefore are not targeted by campaigns, while increased campaign advertising in the final weeks can bring elections to their attention, often after early registration deadlines in many states. She also said young adults are more mobile than other age groups, which makes early registration more difficult. She wrote that the result leaves millions of young voices unheard, cycle after cycle.

She said campaigns had already spent more than $10 billion. Brill used that figure to argue that even 0.01% of the total could have built an on-ramp to democracy rather than paying for mailers and advertising aimed at voters expected to tune out.

In the final days before Nov. 3, Brill urged people in same-day-registration states to reach out to young voters they know and encourage them to register and vote. She said it was not too late for those voters to have their say and that outreach could also begin the habit of voting.

Looking beyond the election, Brill called for rebuilding systems that bring young voters into registration and said that work would require time, money and vision.