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Covid-19 Changed How We Vote. It Could Also Change Who Votes.
In presidential election years, state driver licensing offices and registration drives generate a torrent of new voters. The pandemic has cut that to a trickle.
WASHINGTON — In a normal election year, volunteers from the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of the League of Women Voters would have spent last weekend at the Columbus Arts Fair, pens and clipboards in hand, looking to sign up new voters among the festival’s 400,000 or so attendees.
This is not a normal election year. “There are absolutely no festivals this summer,” said Jen Miller, the executive director of the league’s state chapter. “We don’t have volunteers at tables. We don’t have volunteers roving with clipboards. Obviously, we’re just not doing that.”
Neither is pretty much anyone else. First the Covid-19 pandemic upended how people vote, forcing a huge shift to mailed-in ballots in primary elections nationwide. Now it is taking aim at who can vote — the millions of people who would ordinarily register or update their registrations in a presidential election year.
New voter registrations in 12 states and the District of Columbia plummeted 70 percent in April compared to January, before the coronavirus became a major public issue, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit.
By comparison, the center reported, new registrations in the 13 surveyed jurisdictions rose by 43 percent during the same period in 2016.
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