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See also: “Video: Oregon’s Automatic Voter Registration”

After several years of work by a diverse set of citizen groups and government officials, Oregon passed the nation’s first automatic voter registration (AVR) law in 2015.¹ It went into effect in January 2016 and was in use for the 2016 elections. Locally termed Oregon Motor Voter (OMV), the program aims to modernize the voter registration system, make voter rolls more accurate and efficient, simplify the registration process for voters and administrators, and increase voter participation.

The system assures that every eligible citizen who interacts with the Oregon Office of Motor Vehicles has an up-to-date registration record and is able to vote. By a wide range of measures, Oregon’s modern voter registration system had positive effects:

• More than 272,000 new people were added to the voter rolls, and more than 98,000 of them were new voters in the November 2016 presidential election.
• OMV registrants made up 8.7 percent of people registered to vote and constituted 4.7 percent of all voters in Oregon.
• More than 116,000 people registered who were unlikely to have done so otherwise, and more than 40,000 of these previously disengaged people voted in the November election.
• Oregon’s electorate is now more representative of the state’s population since citizens registered through OMV are younger, more rural, lower-income, and more ethnically diverse.

This report finds significant demographic and geographic differences between these newly registered voters and those who registered through traditional means. Compared with traditional registrants and voters, AVR registrants and voters were:

• Noticeably younger—about 40 percent of AVR registrants and 37 percent of AVR voters were age 30 or younger. In comparison, 20 percent of eligible Oregon citizens are age 18 to 29
• More likely to live in suburban areas and less likely to live in urban areas
• More likely to live in low- and middle-income areas
• More likely to live in lower-education areas
• More likely to live in racially diverse areas—the average AVR registrant’s community was more Hispanic and less white than that of traditional registrants 

While every state may have different attributes, Oregon provides strong evidence in favor of automatic voter registration. AVR strengthens democracy by expanding and broadening the electorate. AVR’s streamlined systems can save states and localities significant costs, make the voter registration lists more accurate and up to date, and increase the security of the voting system. AVR is the next logical step in creating an efficient, secure, and modern voter registration system for the 21st century.

For a full-size version of the interactive, click here.

Under Oregon’s AVR system, eligible citizens are automatically registered to vote through records collected by the Office of Motor Vehicles. All the information necessary to determine voting eligibility for general elections is already required by the agency in its applications for driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, and identification cards.

When Oregonians provide their name, address (residence and/or mailing, if applicable), birthdate, and citizenship information to the Office of Motor Vehicles, the agency transmits the information to the Elections Division of the Office of the Secretary of State. Only individuals who confirm their citizenship through the Office of Motor Vehicles transaction are added through AVR. Information for applicants who demonstrate their residence in another way and individuals with protected or confidential records are not transmitted to the secretary of state.

Once the Oregon Elections Division receives qualifying voter records from the Office of Motor Vehicles, it sends postcards to newly registered voters informing them that:

• They will be registered to vote through AVR.
• They can decline to be added to the voter registration list by signing and mailing back the postcard.
• They can register with a political party by returning the postcard, which allows them to participate in the state’s closed partisan primary elections.

Potential registrants have 21 days to return the postcard before further action is taken. Citizens who do not return the postcard are added to the voter registration list as nonaffiliated voters. Individuals can change their registration status, including party affiliation, at any time through Oregon’s efficient online voter registration system or by submitting a form to a county elections office.

The Office of Motor Vehicles also forwards address updates to the Oregon Elections Division, which checks the new information against the current records and updates the voter’s address if it is newer than the address information on the registration file.

Oregon is using available technology to make a simple switch and transform the voter registration paradigm. In this way, Oregon’s AVR is an election reform that hits the administrative sweet spot by both improving election security and integrity and expanding voting access.

The Office of the Oregon Secretary of State reported that 238,876 Oregonians registered as unaffiliated voters through the AVR system in 2016, and another 33,826 sent the postcard back to affiliate with a political party.² In all, 272,702 individuals were automatically registered to vote and more than 98,000 subsequently went on to vote in the 2016 presidential election.

However, how many people did AVR register who would not have registered themselves? How many of them turned out who would not have voted otherwise?

Without the benefit of a controlled experiment, definitive answers to these questions are not available, but some educated guesses are possible. Using the data available in the voter file, let us assume that people with a low probability of registering themselves had the following characteristics:

• They were not registered during the 2008, 2010, 2012, or 2014 elections.
• They were old enough that they could have been registered and voted since 2008.
• They did not return their registration postcard.³

Using those criteria, more than 116,000 people who were registered through OMV would probably not have registered otherwise. Of those, more than 40,000 voted in 2016.

As of October 31, 2016, 1.4 million records had been electronically transmitted from the Office of Motor Vehicles to the secretary of state, and about 75 percent of these records matched an existing registered voter. The secretary of state’s office sent 304,227 mailers that notified people of a new registration.

Of the 304,227 mailers sent, 9,485 were undeliverable and thus not registered—a little more than 3 percent of all postcards—while 25,112 eligible citizens decided to decline registration and returned their postcard indicating that choice. The 269,130 eligible individuals were forwarded to the county clerks, who added them to the rolls. Of those 269,130 voters, 32,430, or 11 percent, returned their cards to choose a political party.

While turnout was up across the country in the 2016 election cycle, Oregon experienced the largest surge of any state—a 4.1 point increase compared with 2012.⁴ Given the results above, it seems reasonable to say that AVR played a large part in that increase.

A well-known feature of American politics is that the processes for registering voters in each state—typically more difficult than in most other democratic nations—results in a registered voter population that is different than the general population.⁵ Registered people tend to be older, more educated, have higher incomes, and are, as a group, less racially diverse than the total pool of eligible citizens of voting age.⁶

Therefore, when a state changes the registration process, it’s important to ask whether the changes reinforce those differences or diminish them. The following section answers this question for AVR in Oregon using demographic and geographic data from the statewide voter registration file, which includes individuals’ home addresses and dates of birth. (see Methodology section for more detail on the use of the addresses)

Age

OMV registrants were much younger than traditional registrants.

While AVR in Oregon was not specifically designed to target the youngest voters, it did wind up registering a disproportionately young group of people. People ages 18 to 29 made up about 18 percent of traditional registrants in 2016 but a little more than 40 percent of OMV registrants. In comparison, 18- to 29-year-olds are approximately 20 percent of Oregon’s eligible citizen population.⁷

Rural versus urban

OMV registrants lived in less urban and more suburban areas compared with traditional registrants.

Using the geographic data in the voter file and rural categories developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the authors categorized all registrants as living in urban or rural ZIP codes.⁸ OMV registrants were less likely to live in areas classified as “metropolitan core” than their traditionally registered counterparts (67.7 percent versus 61.4 percent) and more likely to live in nonmetro but urban-adjacent areas (14.3 percent versus 17.6 percent). In other words, compared with traditional registrants, OMV registrants were less likely to come from dense urban areas and more likely to come from the suburbs surrounding cities.

Income

Compared with traditional registrants, OMV registrants lived in areas with lower incomes.

The median OMV registrant lived in an area with a median income of $49,886. The same figure for a comparable traditional registrant was $54,200.⁹ Figure 2 displays the distribution of OMV and traditional registrants across neighborhoods of differing median incomes. OMV registrants were much more likely to come from places where the median income is less than $60,000 compared with traditional registrants (67.5 percent versus 59.3 percent). Traditional registrants were more likely to live in higher-income areas.

Additionally, the median OMV registrant came from an area where 12.7 percent of households had experienced poverty in the past 12 months compared with only 11.3 percent for a traditional registrant.

Race

OMV registrants lived in areas that were less white and more Hispanic than traditional registrants.

The average area in which an OMV registrant lived was 1.6 percent less white and 1.8 percent more Hispanic than the comparable area of a traditional registrant. As shown in Table 1, OMV registrants were also more likely to be located in areas that were less black and less Asian, but these differences were relatively minor.

Education

OMV registrants lived in less educated areas when compared with traditional registrants.

As shown in Table 2, OMV registrants were more likely to live in areas where people had a lower level of education. Specifically, individuals in the areas where OMV registrants lived were more likely to have an education level classified as less than high school, high school, or some college. Traditional registrants were more likely to live in areas where people had higher levels of educational attainment.

Geographic distribution

While OMV registrants made up 8.7 percent of registered voters in the 2016 election, OMV registration was not evenly distributed around the state. Some communities had a larger percentage of their population registered through AVR while others had a smaller percentage. Figure 3 breaks down areas into six categories based on how many of their registered voters were registered through OMV—less than 3 percent; 3 percent to 5.9 percent; 6 percent to 8.9 percent; 9 percent to 11.9 percent; 12 percent to 14.9 percent; and 15 percent or more. Figure 3 shows that most people who were newly registered to vote through the system lived in places where a substantial percentage of registrants were registered through OMV.

In fact, a little more than 12 percent of registered voters lived in areas where 12 percent or more of the registrants were registered through the OMV. Only a very small percentage of registered voters (about 1 percent) lived in a place where less than 3 percent of the registered voters were OMV registrants.

There is substantial geographic variation in OMV registration—“hot” and “cold” spots with a higher or lower than average share of OMV registrants. Although these results are preliminary, Figure 4 shows that many of the areas with a below average share of OMV registrants (displayed here in green) were clustered in Portland city proper and the western suburbs and follow Oregon Route 99W—a state highway that passes through comparatively well-off agricultural areas and two college towns. OMV likely did not add as many new voter registrants in these areas because they already had high registration rates—a function of the population’s relatively higher income and education levels. The other “cold spots”—Bend and Redmond in the center of the map as well as small Wallowa mountain towns in the far northeastern corner of the map—fit a similar pattern.

OMV resulted in a comparatively higher rate of registration in the “hot spots” colored orange on the map. Much of the coast appears orange, but what is not visible at this resolution is that most of the orange is inland, just off the coast, while the wealthier coastline areas are, in fact, green. This is the first hint that OMV benefitted areas that are facing economic decline—even when they are geographically contiguous to well-off areas.

In the Portland metro area, the “hot spots” are quite distinctive to any observer familiar with the rapid changes that the region has experienced over the past decade. Most of the orange is concentrated in areas immediately east of Portland, areas with higher proportions of middle- and lower-income citizens and the home of most of Portland’s communities of color. This pattern continues south through communities clustered along the Interstate 5 corridor.

At the southern tip of the Willamette Valley, the same pattern evidenced on the coast repeats itself. The green area is Medford and Ashland—the only pockets of wealth in the area. The orange regions are Grants Pass to the east, a city hit hard by the timber downturn, and Klamath Falls to the west, an agricultural town that has been engaged in a long-running dispute over water rights.

Finally, the bright patches of orange in the northeastern portion of the map extending down the eastern edge represent the cities of Boardman, Pendleton, Umatilla, and Ontario, which are just over the Idaho border and made up of ranch and farm country. The splotches of green, noted above, are small tourist areas in the Wallowa mountain range.

In summary, while the most populous areas saw more OMV registrations in total, the system created the most added value in regions that saw a substantial number of new residents or were particularly battered by changes in Oregon’s economy over the past 20 years.

While the registration numbers outlined above are impressive, the eventual standard by which Oregon’s AVR program will be judged is whether it spurs greater civic participation. In short, do the individuals registered through OMV show up to vote?

In the November 2016 election, 84.1 percent of traditionally registered voters—more than 2 million people—cast a ballot in Oregon, a high bar for participation. OMV voters turned out at more than half that rate—43.6 percent.

However, it is important to put this turnout rate in context. First, as detailed earlier, OMV registrants were markedly younger than their traditional registrant counterparts. As such, any comparison needs to take this into account. After accounting for these differences by weighting the OMV registrants as if their age distribution matched that of the traditionally registered population, the age adjusted OMV turnout rate is a bit higher—46.6 percent.¹⁵

Second, many OMV registrants have been disengaged from the political process for an extended period of time. Under these circumstances, a turnout rate of more than half that of traditional registrants is not only an accomplishment—it is also a gap that is expected to close as individuals become more involved in political life.

Third, as with all things, variation is expected. That is, while 43.6 percent may be the average turnout rate for OMV registrants, this number is likely to vary based on important demographic, political, and geographic characteristics. This section explores how turnout varied by age, demography, geography, and whether one affiliated with a party.

Put simply, did the differences among registrants carry over into those who showed up and voted on election day? By and large, the answer is yes. Although more muted than the differences between OMV and traditional registrants, OMV voters are also demographically and geographically distinct from their traditional counterparts.

Age

OMV voters were much younger than traditional voters.

Just like OMV registrants, OMV voters were disproportionately young. Those ages 18 to 29 made up about 13 percent of traditional registrants who voted but a little more than 37 percent of OMV voters. For reference, 18- to 29-year-olds make up 20 percent of Oregon’s eligible citizen population.¹⁶

Rural versus Urban

Compared with traditional voters, OMV voters lived in less urban and more suburban areas.

Using the same ZIP code rurality categories employed in the previous section, the authors found similar results for voters who were registered through the OMV. Compared with traditional voters, they were less likely to come from metropolitan area core ZIP codes (68.1 percent versus 64.9 percent) and more likely to come from nonmetro but urban-adjacent areas (14.1 percent versus 16.1 percent).

Income

Compared with traditional voters, OMV voters lived in lower-income areas.

The median OMV voter lived in an area with a median income of $49,886. The same figure for a comparable traditional voter was $55,446. The median OMV voter came from an area where 11.7 percent of households had experienced poverty in the past 12 months compared with only 10.8 percent of their traditional counterparts.

Race

Compared with traditional voters, OMV voters lived in areas that were less white and more Hispanic.

Just like registrants, OMV voters, on average, lived in places that were more racially diverse. The average OMV voter lived in an area that was 1.1 percent less white and 1.1 percent more Hispanic.