The Cost of Voter Registration

This month, the Pew Center on the States in Cooperation with the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, released an Oregon Case study on the The Real Cost of Voter Registration. The study looks at the costs incurred at the State, county, city, and township levels of government in Oregon during the 2008 election. The study found that Oregon spent $9.7 million dollars in state, local and federal dollars on voter registration during that election year.

Here are some highlights of where that money was spent:

• The single biggest expense was $1 million to operate and maintain OCVR, the Oregon Central Voter Registration database, required by federal law and paid for in part with federal money.
• The state spent $200,000 to print voter registration forms,
• State agencies spent $2.8 million on voter registration activities
• Counties spent $6.9 million, most of it in payroll costs.

Being the first state to undertake an honest analysis of these costs is a tremendous learning opportunity for the State of Oregon. As Secretary Brown put it, “It’s important to understand that this is the first statewide registration cost survey. So we have no way of knowing whether our costs are high, low or average compared to other states. We’ll learn more as other states take this on.”

And what did we get in terms of measurable gains in registration with this $9.7 million dollars?

Well, we can start with 76,337 (2.8% of those eligible) new registrants from January 1 to the primary election deadline of April 29 of 2008. Add another 144,957 (5.4% of those eligible) registrants from the primary until the general election deadline for an 8.2% total voter registration jump in just one election cycle. But winning registering new voters is only part of the story, a great deal of resources are dedicated to updating voter registration information to insure their accuracy. This includes any address and phone number changes, party registration, etc. for the 2,153,914 registered voters in the State of Oregon, no small task!

Secretary of State Brown was excited about the results of the study and the opportunity to help streamline the voter registration system in Oregon, starting with the opening of the online voter registration in March of 2010. When asked, she said, “Pew has done a terrific job of analyzing costs from all levels of government. This is the first statewide study of its kind in the country and will be a great help to the other states. Knowing the real costs can help us develop a system that spends less on bureaucracy and registers more eligible voters.”