This week in the War on Voting: Don't blame Canada, emulate it

Meteor Blades wrote earlier in the week about the Pew Center on the State's study detailing the problems the antiquated voter registration system most states use, and the subsequent crappy voter lists most states are working with. He summed up their findings:

• Once duplicates are eliminated, some 24 million registration records, or nearly 13 percent of the national total, are estimated to be inaccurate or no longer valid. About half of these do not have currently valid addresses.

• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active voters.

• About 2.75 million people have active registrations in more than one state.

• An estimated 51 million eligible U.S. citizens are unregistered, or nearly one-fourth of the eligible population.

• The cost of printing and processing forms, handling returned mail from inaccurate records, maintaining registration databases and other expenses add millions of dollars to state and local budgets.

While the Pew Center findings did not suggest any kind of voter fraud or voter suppression from these problems, they did suggest the need for the U.S. to get serious—and modern—about how it conducts elections. To that end, the Brennan Center for Justice has a plan featuring:

• Automated Registration: State election officials automatically register consenting eligible citizens by electronically transmitting reliable information from other government lists.
• Portability: Once an eligible citizen is on a state’s voter rolls, she remains registered and her records move with her so long as she continues to reside in that state.
• Safety Net: Eligible citizens can correct errors on the voter rolls before and on Election Day.
• Online Access: Voters can register, check and update their registration records through a secure and accessible online portal.

If Republican state legislators and secretaries of state were truly concerned about the integrity of the vote, they'd be pursuing these policies. Of course, they're not concerned with the integrity of the vote. They're concerned about letting as few people as possible vote.

For more of the week's news, make the jump below the fold.