Motor Voter Act

Registering to vote in the United States became easier beginning May 20, 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed into law the so-called Motor Voter Act. The law required most states to provide eligible citizens the opportunity to register when they applied for or renewed a driver's license. It also required states to allow mail-in registration and to provide voter registration forms at agencies that supplied public assistance, such as welfare checks or help for the disabled. Compliance with the federally mandated program was required by 1995. Costs were to be borne by the states.

The act exempted six states (Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) that had no voter registration or that permitted residents to register on election day.

[Page p277]Partly as a result of the legislation, a record number of new voters, some 10 million, signed up in the first three years following implementation of the act. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) reported to Congress in 1996 that the United States had 143 million registered voters, or 72.8 percent of the voting-age population. The percentage was the highest since 1960, when national registration figures first became available. In its 2001 report, the FEC noted that national registration dropped marginally, to 72.6 percent. However, registration increased among states covered by the Motor Voter Act to 73.8 percent.

Maryland Department of Transportation

For years, political activists had tried both to simplify the process of registering to vote and to shorten the length of time (the residency requirement) that many states mandated before deeming that citizens had the right to register to vote. Efforts to increase voter registration had begun in a handful of states by the mid-1980s, with state legislatures ordering motor vehicle departments to provide voter registration forms. By 1992 twenty-seven states had some type of motor voter practices in place. But state programs varied in their degree of sophistication and their effect on voter turnout.

In most Western nations, government agencies sign up voters, but the United States places the burden for qualifying for electoral participation on the citizen. Although the procedure is still somewhat cumbersome, the Motor Voter Act along with other federal legislation has made voter registration more convenient.

The motor vehicle itself helped to create one of the obstacles to registration. As American society became more mobile, some potential voters encountered difficulty with residency requirements. Many states had required residency for as long as two years before a citizen could register to vote. The 1970 Voting Rights Act Amendment guaranteed the vote in presidential elections if the citizen had lived in the voting district for at least thirty days prior to the election. This measure, analysts have estimated, made approximately 5 million people eligible to vote in the 1972 presidential election.

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Marston v. Lewis that states could not deny the full franchise to people who had not lived in a state for a year and in a county for three months. By 1980 seventeen states had no residency requirement, and all but one had requirements of thirty or fewer days.

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