Will New York ever begin automatically registering voters?

In 2020, New York became the 19th state in the country to pass a law enacting automatic voter registration, but more than a year after the planned start date, the state still has yet to implement the program. 

The system would automatically register people to vote when they interact with state agencies which already possess all of the necessary information needed to do so. The goal of this legislation in New York is to boost participation among the more than 1 million people in the state who are eligible to vote but have not registered. 

“We have one of the worst levels of voting participation in the country, and we have worked hard since we took the majority to repair that,” state Sen. Michael Gianaris, who sponsored the bill, said at a press conference about automatic voter registration in June. 

When the bill was passed, it was set to be implemented in stages for different state agencies. Automatic voter registration was planned for the Department of Motor Vehicles by Jan. 1, 2023. State social service agencies would follow and have it implemented by Jan. 1, 2024, and SUNY would be last to receive it by Jan. 1, 2025. But automatic voter registration has not yet been implemented at any of these state agencies in what amounts to a spectacular delay caused by a few key problems. 

Pandemic delays and bidding issues

The COVID-19 pandemic presented the first and most obvious challenge for the state Board of Elections and the DMV when it came to implementing automatic voter registration. The state Board of Elections had to move quickly to put in place mail-in voting and launch an online absentee ballot request portal from scratch in the chaos of a pandemic presidential election. The resources and attention required to do that caused delays with the early stages of implementing automatic voter registration. 

“Democracy had to go on. Ballot access had to go on. County boards had to conduct the elections, so there was a lot of work,” said Kathleen McGrath, director of public information at the New York State Board of Elections. 

After the COVID-caused delays, the state Board of Elections experienced back-to-back failures with two separate, undisclosed private companies to procure the code and technology required to create an automatic voter registration system. 

The first attempt at procurement began in January 2021 with a mini-bid that was meant to keep the timeline for implementation short. Mini-bids are usually a quicker process than full requests for proposals because the bidding vendors are preapproved by the Office of General Services. After hearing back from the bidding companies in February, however, the State Board of Elections determined that a full request for proposals was necessary because they wanted the code behind the voter registration system to be created without third party software, and none of the companies from the mini-bid process were equipped to do so. 

The Board of Elections then submitted a full request for proposals in April 2021, and a company was selected through that process in September 2022. However, the company selected through that process backed out because another state working with the same company was against sharing code with New York. As a result, the Board of Elections had to start from scratch, submitting a fresh request for proposals in May 2023. By this time, the DMV’s deadline for implementation had already come and gone. 

After two failed bids, the third time was the charm. In August 2023, the Board of Elections began pursuing an agreement with New York State’s Office of Information Technology Services which is ongoing, and “the timeline has been moving smoothly since” according to McGrath. 

The state budget allocated $16.6 million for the program, and the estimated cost for New York State’s Office of Information Technology Services to create the system is $2.6 million, according to the Board of Elections. Automatic voter registration is expected to come online at the DMV in the first quarter of 2025, and it is expected to come online for the state’s social service agencies in the second quarter of 2025. 

New legislation 

But new legislation surrounding automatic voter registration could cause even further hiccups and delays in implementation. 

Gianaris, who sponsored the original automatic voter registration bill, has presented an amendment to that bill that could push back the timeline for the DMV to mid-2027. The amended bill would change how people are given the option to opt out of registering to vote. Instead of being asked at point of service, they would be notified by mail after the fact that they were already registered with the option to opt out. This is called “back-end” registration. 

Many automatic voter registration advocates say back-end registration is more efficient, accurate and secure. But in the context of extreme delays the current law has been facing, enacting a whole new system of automatic voter registration which requires yet another layer of planning and infrastructure bears risk. 

According to the back-end automatic voter registration bill, the DMV and Medicaid would be expected to use the system outlined in the original 2020 law up until the 2027 start date of the back-end system. The original system, however, is expected to come online in 2025, which would only leave about two years for these state agencies to then implement the more complex back-end system. Assembly Member Karines Reyes, who is sponsoring the back-end automatic voter registration bill alongside Gianaris, said, “the switch wouldn’t be significant in terms of what happens administratively, and we don’t anticipate it would cause any further delays.” 

The question is whether or not the risk is worth the reward. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that, “the increase in registration rates is similarly high whichever version of the policy is adopted.” On the other hand, a more recent study from the Institute for Responsive Government found that switching to back-end automatic voter registration in Delaware led to a 26.1% increase in registration. There is certainly evidence that back-end automatic voter registration has benefits over its counterpart, but New Yorkers can only hope that implementation will go more smoothly this time around.