Registering Voters and Certifying the Votes

More from our inbox:

• Trump’s Claim About Harris’s Crowds
• An Olympic Thank You
• Covid Vaccines and Health Care Disparities
• Food and the Climate

Credit…Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

To the Editor:

Re “Some States Targeting Voter Registration Drives With Restrictions” (news article, July 27):

As the founder and C.E.O. of The Civics Center, a national, nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to making voter registration part of every high school in America, I appreciated your bringing light to these issues.

Making it harder to host registration drives disproportionately harms younger Americans. Our data show that less than one-third of 18-year-olds are currently registered to vote in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona and New Hampshire.

If states keep adding hurdles to registering to vote, we’ll be stuck in a vicious cycle of youth alienation that can have devastating effects on our society.

The good news is this can be fixed: by incorporating nonpartisan voter registration in schools and by passing legislation to designate high schools as voter registration agencies under the National Voter Registration Act. That requires states to actually want to solve this crisis.

For now, the best I can advise is for students to take this into their own hands and organize the most inclusive and dynamic registration drives they can for their schools as soon as they return from summer break. When back to school means ready to vote, we’ll have the kind of shift we need.

Laura W. Brill
Los Angeles

To the Editor:

You report on efforts to prevent people from voting in Florida and other states. However, such data are worrying only if one assumes that votes will be counted and certified, as in a normal election. Is it not a greater cause for concern if dozens of 2020 election deniers have been placed in positions of authority to certify the votes in swing states?

Advertisement