Map of the Day: Automatic Voter Registration

Oregon gets a lot of attention every election year because it’s gotten rid of polling places and gone to 100 percent mail-in ballots. That’s great, but Oregon’s real contribution was its leadership in something much more important: automatic voter registration. If you have a driver’s license, you’re registered to vote. End of story. It’s a trend that’s now spreading across the country:

Now, you will notice that Georgia and West Virginia are the only Republican states to have adopted automatic voter registration so far. So this is not quite the bipartisan initiative we might have hoped for. Still, it’s progress.

Of course, what would really be progress would be national ID cards. Everyone with an ID that marks them eligible to vote gets a ballot by mail, full stop. If you don’t have an address, you drop into a polling place, show your ID, and vote. If you try to vote twice, a computer catches you and a warrant is issued for your arrest. Done.

Now all I have to is convince all you laggards that a national ID card would be a good—no, a great—thing. So far, I’ve had no luck on that score.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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