WASHINGTON — Oregon’s legislature is widely expected to pass an automatic voter registration bill this year that could add up to 300,000 voters to the rolls by the 2016 election, making it the first state in the nation to implement the kind of system that other countries, like Canada, have had for decades.
The bill has been championed by the Democratic Secretary of State Kate Brown, whose office estimated there are about 800,000 Oregonians eligible to vote but not registered. Last year, a similar piece of legislation passed the state House but failed in the state Senate by a split vote.
Automatic voter registration is expected to prevail this session, however, due to the legislature’s new partisan composition. Oregon was the the only state in the nation where both houses of the legislature gained Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.
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As Democrats in the U.S. begin to consider Canadian-style voting processes, conservative Canadian legislators are increasingly making Republican-style arguments about the dangers of voter fraud. Last year, the Canadian House of Commons passed a controversial law supported by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party implementing new voter identification requirements.
“It has heightened, the paranoia about [fraud], in conservative circles,” Wiseman said. “[Harper’s government] has increasingly put on more rules.”
