CREATING THE OPPORTUNITY: VOTING AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, an organiza- tion concerned with the involvement of citizens in politics, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, has collected the largest inventory of registra- tion laws and electoral provisions from the fifty states. It has incorporated these into an analysis designed to compare the relative impact of individual requirements, and sets of provisions, on turnout intended to determine the projected increase in voter participation if different strategies were adopted. The electoral changes addressed include door-to-door registration, driver's license registration, the elimination of purging from the rolls for non-voting, election day registration and mail registration. The data pool and analysis may be the most thorough of its kind ever attempted and ones that can serve as the basis for the future comparative research. The analysis finds that election day registration and a liberalized deputy registration program in combination with restrictions on dropping non-voters from the rolls would have the most immediate impact on turnout. States with the most open, least restrictive registration requirements had the highest levels of political participation.