MS passes major voting reform bill, state finally arrives in 21st century

[Tender Branson]

House passes early voting, online registration, election reform

The House on Thursday overwhelmingly passed elections and voting reforms pushed by Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, including a major re-write of election code and measures to allow online voter registration and early voting up to 14 days before an election.

"Today we turn the page on 125 years of Mississippi history," Hosemann said. "To have a complete in toto revision of our election laws shows that we have bipartisan trust in each other in Mississippi. We trusted each other on voter ID before and we were the only state not sued, and now we have total bipartisan support for these changes ... The Mississippi House is awesome."

The measures head to the Senate, which has similar legislation facing a deadline today.

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2016/03/03/election-reform-bill-heads-senate/81268780

...

Good.

[pbrower2a]

Mississippi becoming a swing state? Maybe.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Wow, didn't expect that from a Republican-controlled legislature. Great news!

[Virginiá]

Honestly, early voting hasn't been shown to really increase turnout at all, but it is surprising because iirc, African Americans tend to use early voting a lot and that could help them more than anything. Then again, given how racially partisan that state is, I doubt it will change anything.

Online voter registration is cheaper and doesn't give partisan advantages really either. So no surprise there.

So all in all, this isn't really major - Unless we're talking relative to other deep red states, in which case yeah, I guess.

[Virginiá]

What would be major in your view?  Universal registration or universal vote by mail?

1. Automatic voter registration using DMV / social services agencies (or basically any other agency that can be used for this purpose). Have this register 18 year olds as soon as they hit that age, and have it automatically update info as people move.

2. Same-day registration to catch those who didn't get registered by the auto-registration, and also to allow party changes. With Auto-Reg, there probably won't be a lot of people using this so long lines aren't really a worry.

3. Vote-By-Mail like Colorado,Washington and Oregon.

Automatic registration combined with vote-by-mail would bring in a massive number of new voters as comprehensive automatic registration would provide a nearly complete list (or as complete as you can expect) of eligible voters to send ballots to. Oregon already had impressive turnout with vote-by-mail without auto-reg, so this year should be even better.

Anyway, even just auto-reg and vote-by-mail would be very good and significantly increase voter participation. It would reduce costs as well if you used it in place of in-person voting. However, a state like MS doing this is very hard to imagine, given how many additional Democratic African American voters it would bring into the process. Instead, MS goes with the light changes that do nothing for turnout. Typical Republican antics.

[RI]

Yeah, but did they modernize their website and election data reporting system?

[DINGO Joe]

Yeah, but did they modernize their website and election data reporting system?

Let's not get crazy here.

[Adam Griffin]

GA did this in 2014 (online VR; it did not shorten registration deadline). It really doesn't provide any inherent benefit to one side or another and it saves the state money.