The latest analysis of automatic voter registration by the New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice is plainly reflective of their potential positive impact. An article analyzing the findings come to you from Daily Kos journalist Stephen Wolf:

In April, New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice released a new report that for the first time uses rigorous statistical analysis to examine the impact of automatic voter registration (AVR) laws isolated from confounding variables, and their finding is that AVR has led to a significant increase in new voter registrations in every jurisdiction where it has been implemented. AVR puts the burden of registration on the government by automatically registering eligible voters who interact with certain state agencies, unless they opt out. Oregon became the first state to enact AVR in 2015, and since then more than a dozen states and D.C. have passed AVR into law, as shown on the map at the top of this post.

While AVR laws are relatively new, and some have yet to go into effect, the Brennan Center’s report was able to compare rates of new registrations across different years both before and after implementation. Importantly, they didn’t just look at individual states over time, but instead statistically matched each jurisdiction that implemented AVR with “control” regions around the country that were demographically similar but didn’t implement AVR during that time period. This methodology enabled the researchers to try to isolate AVR’s effects on new registration rates from other variables.

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