National Voter Registration Day: Biden Decries Restrictions In States

ACROSS AMERICA — President Joe Biden said in a National Voter Registration Day proclamation Monday that he is doubling the number of Justice Department employees dedicated to voter advocacy and enforcement as part of a “whole-of -government” effort to increase access to voting.

National Voter Registration Day, a nonpartisan civic holiday observed for the past decade to reach tens of thousands of Americans who might not otherwise register.

Some 39 states that have made significant changes in election laws since the 2020 presidential election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

The United States “has not always lived up to its promise of equal access to the right to vote,” Biden said in the proclamation, decrying state legislatures he said “are passing new forms of voting restrictions to limit participating and choose whose vote can count at all.”

“As the late Representative John Lewis, an icon of the voting rights struggle, would say, ‘democracy is not a state; it is an act.’ Our Founding Fathers understood this, as did the suffragists at the National Women’s Rights Convention of 1848, the other giants of the Civil Rights Movement, and today’s activists working for a freer, fairer, and more accessible voting system. Just as securing and protecting voting rights was the test of their times, it continues to be the challenge of ours.”

Biden renewed his commitment to the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together would “address election subversion, remove dark money from politics, end partisan gerrymandering, and fix the gaping holes in voter access left by the Supreme Court of the United States.”

He also said he is doubling both the number of voter advocates appointed to the Department of Justice and the agency’s voting rights enforcement staff, and also giving the agency purview over discriminatory laws before they go into effect.

More than 4.7 million Americans have been registered to vote in the Voter Registration Day project to date. More than 300,000 people registered to vote for the first time on the inaugural National Voter Registration Day in 2019. Some 1.5 million people registered through the project for the 2020 General Election, according to the website.

Last year, 233,571 people registered or updated their registration. Though considerably smaller than the number of people who registered for the 2020 presidential election, the number was still nearly twice the number registered in the previous post-presidential cycle, the report noted.

Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, the project helped 865,015 people register to vote.

A step-by-step process on the National Voter Registration Day website guides potential voters through registration. For all potential voters: Check your registration status, especially if you’ve moved since you last voted, recently turned 18 or changed your name.