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Rose DuBois of Portland is the electoral organizing director for Maine Youth Power.
Early this year Maine joined 41 states and Washington, D.C. in launching a website to allow residents to register to vote online. Passed into law in 2021, and going live in February, online voter registration is a huge step forward in modernizing our electoral process and strengthening our state’s democracy, which should be celebrated.
Registering to vote using the website is fairly straightforward. Residents simply provide the information needed, including their address, either their Maine license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, and which political party, if any, they want to enroll as. After hitting submit the secretary of state’s office will register the user with their town office and they will be officially registered to vote in Maine.
While many will continue to register the old fashioned way at their town office, enabling online voter registration is a major improvement that will allow more Mainers to exercise their right to vote.
This is particularly true for young people, especially those living in more rural parts of the state or those who don’t own a car. It also will be beneficial to college students, who may be out of the state for extended periods of time, making registering in person more complicated. With young people having far lower rates of registration and voting, making the process easier for them by adding an online option will hopefully encourage more active engagement with our democratic institutions.
However, young Mainers will not be the only ones to benefit from this new system. Online voter registration will make it easier for those without adequate access to transportation and disabled residents to register. It will also make it more convenient for anyone looking to register, whether they have recently moved, or for the first time, as opening up a web page is far faster than a trip to a town hall.
Online voter registration will also be a boon to organizations involved with registering voters and encouraging active voter participation. Sending people to a website is far easier than carrying around hundreds of green registration cards, which always have a risk of getting lost.
Even as the new website will be beneficial, Maine still does not have a perfect system. Due to the intricacies of the law, it’s currently not possible to register online within 21 days before an election, an unfortunate issue as the month prior to an election is when most people will be thinking about registering. This also makes it less useful for organizations doing voter registration than it otherwise could have been.
Overall, the 21-day window means online registration is going to primarily be useful for those who are more organized and prepared. This is especially important, as many younger or first-time voters may not be aware of the window, and assume they will be able to do it online, which could prevent them from successfully registering.
Any extra barrier to voting is likely to cause at least some of them to not vote. There are also broader issues, like the lack of high-speed broadband internet access in parts of the state, which need to be remedied to really enable truly everyone to utilize this new system.
Despite these handful of flaws, the ability to register to vote online is a huge win for voting rights, and making voting more accessible for young people in Maine and its implementation should carry excitement this year as we prepare for another major election.
