On the extensive list of ugly election “reforms,” you’ll find automatic voter registration at the very top. No wonder Democrat Gov. Tony Evers, who’s never seen a far-left idea he didn’t like, wants to dump it on Wisconsin.
Republicans, don’t be fooled by claims of “saving democracy” or “protecting voting rights” — thin cover for a “progressive” power grab. Automatic voter registration is the surest way to cripple Wisconsin’s already questionable voter rolls and hand Democrats a permanent advantage in future elections. These are the facts left-wing activists don’t want you to know.
Automatic voter registration is the brainchild of professional activists who want to remake America by corrupting our elections. It’s integral to the left’s larger scheme to enact all-mail elections, paperless ballots, and same-day registration, courtesy of the Brennan Center and its allies.
We know from secret internal documents that so-called progressives think America’s electorate is too white, too old, too rural, and too conservative for Democrats to reliably win elections, so they want to radically “reshape” it wholesale. Their goal is a “New American Majority” — millennials, single women, racial and ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, welfare recipients, and college students — voters whom strategists believe will always support Democrats.
Take it from the New Organizing Institute — deemed “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry” by The Washington Post — which once boasted that New American Majority voters will:
…dramatically shift the American social, economic, and political landscape — allowing us to begin rectifying our country’s historical inequalities. [emphasis added]
Step one is getting this new “majority” on the voter rolls. Over the past decade, mega-funders like the Wyss Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Arabella Advisors’ “dark money” network have pumped an ocean of cash into voter registration campaigns targeting likely Democrats, spending $434 million in 2020 alone.
That money flowed to groups like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action and America Votes, which famously juiced registration and turnout in Georgia’s last three elections. Fair Fight Action raked in $51 million just in 2020, bolstering its turnout machine.
As a result, in 2020 a Democratic presidential nominee won the Peach State’s 16 electoral votes for the first time since 1992 — a victory fellow activists credit to the 800,000 new voters Abrams’ group added to the voter rolls, “turning the tide in Georgia.” Undoubtedly those voters also carried Democrats to victory in the state’s 2021 and 2022 Senate elections.
But remaking America’s electorate is pricey. Even multibillion-dollar foundations like Ford have a limit. To deep-pocketed partisans, automatic voter registration is the ultimate solution to the registration money pit because it gets states — and taxpayers — to fund the work for them. Under Evers’ plan, every “eligible” Wisconsinite with a driver’s license would automatically appear in the state’s voter rolls, made possible with an extra $521,000 in the biennial budget.
Recall that in 2019 Evers proposed making noncitizens eligible for driver’s licenses. Combine both toxic ideas and you have a recipe for flooding Wisconsin’s rolls with illegal aliens.
Think it can’t happen? A “glitch” in Illinois’ automatic voter registration system added 574 noncitizens to the state’s voter rolls in 2018, allowing some to vote in the midterm elections. Liberal NPR admitted in 2019 that automatic voter registration accidentally added 1,500 noncitizens to California’s voter rolls.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation recently discovered that Colorado sent a shocking 31,000 voter registration instructions to noncitizens in the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms. This supposed mistake was a consequence of its membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, which requires member states — including Wisconsin — to attempt to register eligible voters.
States without automatic voter registration already struggle to maintain accurate voter rolls. Why make the problem worse?
Here’s the good news: Republican majorities in the Wisconsin legislature defeated Evers’ effort to license noncitizens in 2019. They can stop automatic voter registration cold in 2023 — if they’re serious about election integrity, that is.
States don’t need automatic voter registration to ensure it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat. Wisconsinites can already register to vote online, while the nonpartisan Voter Reference Foundation makes it easy to look up an individual’s registration status, a citizens’ safeguard against double voting and other problems.
What states do need are lawmakers with a spine who are willing to confront and defeat the left. America’s elections hang in the balance.
