By David Lee, Community Journalism Intern
My parents have never voted.
But it’s not that they don’t care. My dad sits behind the wheel of his truck and my mom painstakingly cleans nails, abiding by the law and our country’s industrial spirit. They’ve done so everyday for more than 30 years, when they first became naturalized citizens.
But they don’t speak English and don’t even think about registering to vote because it is too complicated of a process.
Automatic voter registration in Illinois has been discussed for several years, but has been brought up again in state legislature this month. Current proposals involve using the DMV to give the necessary data for automatic registration, unless the driver chooses to opt out.
Our state needs be doing all it can to get people to the polls. In 2014, less than 35 percent of eligible voters showed up to the polls for the gubernatorial election. More than 2.1 million citizens in Illinois were not even registered to vote.
Demographic studies largely agree the groups not showing up to polls are youths, people of color and recently naturalized immigrants. It’s my parents and me.
Undoubtedly not all of these people will show up to the polls if they were automatically registered – there are a large number of factors keeping people away from ballot boxes. But some people would show up, and that is all that matters.
But there are several possible drawbacks to automatic voter registration. Illegally registering to vote is a federally deportable offense. If people are registered automatically according to any kind of database, it runs the risk that someone will register to vote or maybe even mistakenly vote without citizenship status. Any future legislation would have to address the possibly of voter fraud.
Oregon and California have already passed automatic voter registration bills. California’s large Asian American and undocumented population make it better for understanding the implications of a similar bill in Illinois. The state has agreed to take the onus for any criminal implications arising from automatic registration, but the limits of the legal ramifictions have yet to be tested in court.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago believes civic participation is an integral part of having a voice in our country. A lot of our time and resources are spent educating and mobilizing our community to vote on issues important to them. So much of those extremely limited resources are dedicated to registering people so they even have the option of showing up to elections. With automatic voter registration, organizations like ours can devote our full energy to education and mobilization—the aspects of voting that are most related to showing up.
So when my parents hear the day before elections about an important issue they want to take a stance on, they can go to the nearest polling station and just cast a ballot. Theoretically, their vote should count as much as anybody else’s, but that has not been true. Their vote has not existed. But maybe it is time to take away any barriers that are even possibly hurting our democracy.