Running Voter Registration Like a Business
Applying Proven Customer Service Values to Voter Registration Processes
This is Civic Way’s eighth essay on state and local elections. In this essay, we address the issue of voter registration. In our last commentary, we recommended some redistricting reforms. The author, Bob Melville, is the founder of Civic Way, a nonprofit dedicated to good government, and a management consultant with over 45 years of experience improving government agencies across the US.
Highlights:
Respecting and retaining customers is important to businesses, but many politicians treat prospective voters as potential threats instead of valued customers
Motivated by politics, some voter registration systems make registration hard by purging duly registered voters and infusing the voter registration process with red tape
A modern, customer-oriented voter registration system, with automatic and same-day registration, will reduce public costs and increase voter registration and turnout
Treating Voters Like Customers
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." – Warren Buffett
Some voters (and candidates) talk about running government like a business. It can be hard to discern what such sentiments mean and even harder to apply the lessons of running a business to the complex challenges of running government.
Still, successful businesses have some attributes that government should emulate. Focus, efficiency, agility and innovation. And customer service, the drive to deliver fast, responsive service to customers. The passion for building a long-term relationship with those customers.
All of this begs a question. What if we ran voter registration more like a business? What if we designed every voter registration system to attract and retain more customers? What if we built a system that treated voters with respect and inspired more trust in government?
Customer Service Trends
What is good customer service? Most of us have a better handle on bad customer service. We encounter it every day. Frustrating firewalls. Confusing websites. Useless chat support. Excessive hold times. Inexplicable transfers. Unintelligible or inept agents. Canned cliches about corporate policy.
Winning a new customer costs far more than keeping an old one. And keeping customers isn’t easy in today’s dynamic environment—competition, technology, online shopping, digital payment and new products. The greatest challenge of all? Soaring customer expectations that heavily influence consumer behavior.
To meet rising customer demands, many businesses are investing more in customer service. Hiring better customer service agents. Offering more self-service options. Upgrading customer service technology. And, in most cases, these investments pay for themselves. Intense brand loyalty. More customer referrals. Lower marketing costs. Higher profits.
The Customer is Always Wrong
States have two essential types of voter registration systems. One that makes registration hard and one that makes it easy. Let’s begin with the systems that make voter registration hard.
In many states, especially those controlled by those that fear democracy, voter registration is a highly bureaucratic process with lots of red tape and penalties. These states ignore good business practice and manipulate voter rolls in two ways: 1) they purge (remove) current registered voters and 2) they engulf the registration process with red tape.
These policies defy proven business practice. Instead of treating citizens as customers, they treat them as cheaters. Duly registered voters are often purged from the rolls using dubious, if not flawed, methods. Purging criteria are poorly defined. And even when such criteria are clear, like failing to vote for successive elections, no effort is made to distinguish national, state, local, primary or special elections or ask whether more cost-effective techniques are available for updating voting records.
Making the process taxing and impenetrable discourages citizens from registering. It also makes it harder for election officials to update vital registration data (e.g., primary residence) and forecast polling place needs. It discourages voters from participating in elections and learning more about local issues. It sends a message to many citizens that their vote (if not their citizenship) is irrelevant.
Purging Registered Voters
Purging voter rolls does delist some registered voters who can no longer vote. However, it also can disqualify citizens who can still vote. Many remember that the 2000 presidential election turned on 537 votes in Florida and a partisan US Supreme Court decision. Often forgotten is the state’s botched pre-election purge of over 12,000 eligible voters wrongly identified as ex-felons.
Voter purges have a long tradition. Before the demographic and technological changes of the late 20th century, purges were a widely-accepted mechanism for updating voter registration lists. The theory was that, if a registered voter failed to vote in successive elections, that person had likely died or moved. In lieu of subsequent technological advancements, purges were a practical way to keep lists current.
In recent decades, however, it has become far easier to verify voter changes. Linking public databases make it easier to identify registered voters who have died or moved. Using social security, vital statistics and driver license data, for example. Self-service technology. Proven skip tracing and audit techniques.
Given the availability of more cost-effective techniques for updating voter registration records, purges have become just another voter suppression ploy. Supported by outdated federal law and a 2019 partisan Supreme Court ruling, states can purge registered voters even with flawed methods.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, states purged nearly 16 million registered voters from 2014 to 2016 alone. Despite serious questions about their methods, many states are continuing to pursue aggressive policies that could disenfranchise qualified voters, e.g.:
Arizona – purge voters from mail-in ballot list who fail to vote in two consecutive election cycles
Georgia – purged 1.4 million voters with conflicting names (e.g., different spelling than driver’s license and social security data)
Kentucky – prevented by court from inactivating 175,000 voters who failed to sign an affidavit
Ohio – purged 235,000 voters from county voter rolls, including 40,000 legitimate voters
Oklahoma – deleted over 88,000 voters who failed to vote in two elections and respond to postcard
Texas – conducted a sham voter fraud investigation to justify voter purges
Purging registered voters mirrors other red state efforts to dampen voter turnout. Just another element of a national plan to restrict voter access, early voting, vote by mail and in-person sites and, more recently, overturn election audits.
Discouraging Prospective Voters
Several states inundate the registration process with red tape, creating a virtual legal gauntlet for prospective voters to run. That such policies discourage would-be voters from registering is but happy coincidence. What are these policies?
Opt-in voter registration (the opposite of automatic registration) is one. It requires citizens to take the initiative to register and maintain their registration. It provides the legal foundation for aggressive purging.
Rigid qualifications is another. Several states prohibit felons or ex-inmates from voting. Florida is one. In 2018, nearly 65 percent of that state’s voters approved a ballot measure extending voting rights to ex-felons (an estimated 1.4 million). However, in 2019, the state legislature passed a bill requiring ex-felons to pay any cumulative liabilities associated with their crime before regaining their voting rights.
Registration time limits. There are 35 states that not only prohibit same-day registration, but impose no-registration days. These states prohibit voter registration on certain days preceding the election. The most common zone is 30 days, but some states use smaller zones (e.g., 25 days for New York and 15 days for Pennsylvania). Texas has a 30-day zone and one of the nation’s ten lowest turnout rates.
Suppressing private registration efforts. This policy takes many forms. One is criminalizing registration canvasser payments. Another is penalizing errant voter registration forms. Another is imposing strange rules on private registration drives (e.g., 48-hour submittal deadline). In 2019, after encountering problems with two urban voter registration drives, Tennessee enacted a tough voter registration law that banned registration quotas and imposed fines for filing incorrect forms.
Customer-Friendly Registration
Several states strive to make voter registration easier and more convenient. They do so with initiatives like those summarized below.
Some states encourage voter registration by qualifying more voters. Colorado and Vermont, for example, restored voting rights for ex-inmates. However, Colorado residents must indicate their country of citizenship to obtain a driver’s license. Vermont only grants driver licenses to citizens.
States with Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) automatically register citizens to vote unless they affirmatively opt-out. Typically, such states register citizens to vote upon receiving validation of other events (e.g., driver’s license). According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 18 states and DC have instituted AVR. In 2015, Oregon was the first. Others include California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan and New Mexico. Some AVR systems have experienced rollout problems (e.g., California).
Same-Day Registration (SDR) is another policy that eases registration. It has been enacted by several states, including right-leaning states (e.g., Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah and Wyoming) and left-leaning states (e.g., Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada and Vermont).
Building a Modern Registration System
There are several ways to reform state voter registration systems, including the following:
· Adopt fair voter qualifications – restore voting rights for ex-convicts, eliminate unfair barriers to voting rights and use readily-available tools to verify citizenship at registration (e.g., E-Verify system)
· Foster reliable registration drives – conduct public information campaigns to attract targeted voter groups (e.g., 17-year-olds), certify qualified nonpartisan voter registration groups, tighten registration data controls, offer incentives for accurate registrants and establish reasonable, uniform fines
· Integrate voter registration records – designate lead responsibility (e.g., Federal Elections Commission), link relevant federal, state and local databases across agencies and employ rigorous controls
· Streamline voter registration maintenance – replace extreme purges with calibrated delisting for local elections, use public data and proven skip-tracing techniques to update voter registration records and create a provisional voter designation for voters with data issues
· Implement automatic voter registration – implement a national opt-out voter registration system to automatically register every citizen using other public records
· Simplify state and local registration processes – make online appointments and multiple registration methods available to citizens (e.g., in-person, mail-in and online voter registration) on any day
Government must deliver voter registration like businesses deliver other customer services. In other words, run voter registration like a business. Treat registered and prospective voters as customers, not only to improve government’s brand, but to establish a relationship.
This will require the same kinds of innovations employed by businesses to satisfy their customers. A omnichannel customer engagement strategy. A full range of self-service options. A cloud-based customer service platform. Agent-assist bots for routine workflows.
By establishing a better relationship with voters, election officials will be better positioned to provide them with current voting and election information. They also will find it much easier to engage customers in their ongoing efforts to improve the voting registration system.
The Benefits of a Customer-Oriented Registration System
Modernizing the voter registration system with a stronger customer focus offers many benefits. The system will be more cost-effective. Costs will be lower and employee productivity higher. Errors will decline. Agents will be armed with better information. Customer satisfaction will be tracked.
Ultimately, more citizens will register. More registered voters will vote. Voters will find it easier to track their registration status and obtain helpful information. More voters will encourage others to register. Election officials will learn more about improving their processes. Voter satisfaction—and faith in government—will rise.