Case Study 1: Component 3

Historic Voter Registration 

Pre-registration was historically often used as a way to limit, rather than increase voter participation. Alexander Keyssar provides these examples in “Voter Registration: A Very Short History,” Voter-Registration-A-Very-Short-History.pdf    

• 1866: All voters in New Jersey had to register the Thursday prior to the election (what if you can’t take off work on Thursdays?)  

• 1878: San Francisco voters had to register in person before every single election  

• 1880s: Voters had to be seen by the election judge at their precinct on a Tuesday to make an affidavit to prove they were eligible to vote.  

• 1908: New York City required voters to do their registration on Saturdays (which was inconsistent with practices of the Jewish faith).   

Modern Methods, Key Legislation, and Proposals for Advancing Voter Registration

The election process in America has undergone several advancements passed or proposed at the federal level to initiate ways to make voter registration easier. 

Voting and Fraud

Attempts to change voting practices, including registration, have consistently been met with allegations of voter fraud. Let’s examine what voting fraud means from an historical perspective.

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Historic Voter Registration

The first attempt to regulate voter registration and keep a full record was the "Massachusetts system" – based on the state of Massachusetts and the first attempt to “pre-register” voters before they came to the ballot. One of the primary ways to become qualified to vote was the prove that taxes had been paid – so this system was a check to ensure that only people with a vested interest in the community (proven by their ownership of property and their fulfillment of their tax obligations on that property) were making decisions about issues up for a vote.  

Historian Alexander Keyssar notes that cities were the first places to implement advanced registration procedures. Urban locations, with many transient residents and immigrants meant that election officials had a more difficult time identifying eligible voters. New York City was a hotbed of election conflict, and the state’s first registration law in 1840 was only applicable within the city. There, the law was implemented by members of the Whig Party, who believed Irish immigrants were becoming too powerful as a voting bloc.

Prior to the implementation of private/paper ballots marked in silence and deposited with an assurance of anonymity in a ballot box, voting was much more personal for the voter. John Wise gives a great description of viva voce voting in Virginia – to give the vote orally rather than in writing. In many parts of the country through the mid-nineteenth century, voters approached election officials and orally identified their choice. The vote was recorded and announced to anyone gathered at the polling spot. You can imagine the courage it might have taken to have voted differently than your neighbors or family members!

In the post-Civil War years, immigrants (at this time primarily Irish and German) were targeted by men like William “Boss” Tweed, who offered jobs and bribes in exchange for votes. Tweed was not only an ambitious politician himself (primarily in local politics in New York City), but he was integral to the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine. Elections were so malleable at the time, that Tweed was able to use several tactics to influence the vote. He hired people to go to various wards and cast ballots to get the result he wanted; he bribed election officials and inspectors to look the other way; in some instances, he simply had the election results falsified and the winners he wanted were announced. Inadvertently, Tweed really did help the immigrant population in New York City – because he had men pushed through the naturalization and voter registration for many who had just arrived in the city.  

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Modern Methods, Key Legislation, and Proposals for Advancing Voter Registration

National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) – often called “Motor Voter,” this federal legislation made it possible for Americans to register to vote while transacting business at other state offices (most notably their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles). This law also said that states could not impose registration deadlines more than thirty days before an election.

• Help America Vote Act (2002 – HAVA), required states to build in additional provisions to a computerized statewide voter registration list, including making allowances for mail-based registration of voters.   
  
  
• April 1, 2016 – West Virginia joins two other states by passing a law allowing automatic voter registration when eligible citizens conducted business at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  
  
  
• As of October 2023, Automatic Voter Registration was implemented in twenty-three US states and the District of Columbia. This method requires an individual to make a choice to not register to vote – if you don’t opt out, you are now registered to vote if you use the state systems that support this process. 

Health Care-Based Voter Registration – this 2024 study “suggests that health care-based voter mobilization reaches a distinctly younger and more racially and ethnically diverse population relative to those who reported contact from political campaigns.” Study related to a 2020 founded organization called Vot-ER. McCabe, Katherine, Yinlu Zhu, Simar S Bajaj, and Alister F Martin. “Increasing Voter Participation through Health Care-Based Voter Registration.” JAMA Health Forum 5, no. 6 (n.d.): e241563. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.1563.   

Same-day voter registration is a current measure that has been proposed, although it continues to meet with objections. The District of Columbia and twenty-one states currently utilize same-day voter registration (see Sarah J. Eckman’s “Selected Legislative Issues Related to Voter Registration”). Three other states (Alaska, Montana, and North Carolina) have modified same-day voter registration. The primary objections raised to same-day voter registration are:  

• Difficulty verifying the information provided by voters at the same time an election is being held 

• Impedes the ability of election officials to process the application of a voter 

• Longer wait periods for voters could occur with increased volume at polling sites 

• Additional staff (with associated costs) required to handle same-day voter registration 

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Voting and Fraud

The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems notes that systems of registering voters serve two primary purposes which can be at odds with each other: 1) ensuring that persons who are eligible to vote are able to do so, and, 2) in many instances, a tool to limit participation of particular groups of people (typically marginalized groups in society). Voter registration methods may vary from state to state, or nation to nation, but they can be used to help limit election fraud. This lesson component will ask students to consider:

• Historic examples of real (or imagined) voter fraud and the purposes that fraud served

• Risks to democracy that accompany voter fraud

• Ways to prevent fraud

• Reasons that inaccurate reports of fraud are also problematic to democracy

What is Election Fraud?

The ACE Project’s Electoral Knowledge Network distinguishes individual and group/government fraud, which helps us understand that there can be threats to democracy at different levels and scales.

Individual Fraud

• Impersonating another voter in order to cast more than one ballot

• Using the name/identity of a deceased person to cast more than one ballot

• Using a mail-in ballot meant to represent the vote of another person

Group/Government Fraud

• “Stuffing the Ballot Box” by adding ballots that were not really voted to the ballot box, intentionally misrepresenting votes on ballots that are cast, or improperly confirming vote totals known to be inaccurate to secure a specific result.

• Intimidation through discouraging people from registering to vote, or trying to prevent a registered voter from casting a ballot.

Four Suspects, Vote Sellers: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014688909/  

Participation in group/government voting fraud has been both lucrative for some and restricted the rights of others. This undated image show four men who were incarcerated for attempting to sell their votes – attempting to earn a few dollars in exchange for casting their vote as directed. 

Charles Lewis “Bart” Bartholomew’s 1905 political cartoon illustrating ballot box stuffing in the Tammany Hall political machine system in New York. More Stuffing Due | DPLA 

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Exercise for This Component

Students should do a “mock” voter registration in class by utilizing the standards for the state of West Virginia: West Virginia Secretary of State - Register to Vote Online.