# Automatic Voter Registration **Automatic voter registration (AVR)** changes the default. When an eligible person gets or renews a driver's license or state ID, or deals with another designated state agency, the state registers them to vote, or updates their address on the rolls, unless they decline. Under the older "motor voter" system the [[National Voter Registration Act]] created in 1993, the DMV *offers* you a registration form, and you have to choose to fill it out. Under AVR, you have to choose *not* to be registered. According to the Center for Election Innovation & Research, about **two dozen states plus Washington, D.C.** use AVR as of 2026. They are mostly, but not only, Democratic-led states. Georgia, where Republicans control state government, has run AVR through its Department of Driver Services since 2016. **Oregon** passed the first AVR law in 2015. AVR works. In Georgia, about two-thirds of new registrations came through the automatic program, and roughly 95% of eligible citizens were registered by 2021, one of the highest rates in the country. It also puts a lot of weight on one question that a DMV was never built to answer: **is this person a U.S. citizen?** ## How the DMV decides who is a citizen A DMV is not a citizenship office. It records **which documents you showed** and **what you said on the form.** Whether AVR keeps noncitizens off the rolls depends on how those two pieces of information are recorded and passed to election officials. Three facts make that harder than it sounds: - **A REAL ID does not prove citizenship.** To get one you have to show *either* proof of citizenship *or* proof of lawful presence. A green-card holder and a citizen get the same gold star on the card. The DMV knows which document each person presented, but the card itself does not say. - **Many states license people regardless of immigration status.** All states issue licenses to lawfully present noncitizens. According to the [[America First Policy Institute]], 19 states plus D.C. also issue them to undocumented immigrants. Those standard licenses carry no citizenship information at all. - **So the screen sits in the data, not on the card.** The safeguard is the step where a clerk records the document type and the system decides whether to send the person to election officials. If that step goes wrong, a noncitizen who answered every question truthfully can still be registered. States build the gate differently: | State | How it screens citizenship | |---|---| | Minnesota | Registers automatically only when documentary proof of citizenship was shown. People getting a non-REAL ID license get voting information instead. Green-card holders are not offered registration. | | Georgia | Matches registrations against license or Social Security records. Applicants who can't be confirmed are held as pending. In 2024, about 4,000 were pending, and roughly 2,000 were confirmed as citizens through the federal SAVE database and added. | | Michigan | Keeps applicants not yet verified as citizens on a separate list and contacts them before they are added. | | Colorado and Oregon | Keep images of the documents used to get a license, which election officials can check. | The federal tool states use to double-check is **SAVE**, a [[Department of Homeland Security]] database. It was rebuilt in 2025–26 to search Social Security records and natural-born citizens in bulk. On September 25, 2026, the Supreme Court let the administration keep using it while litigation continues. North Carolina ran 7.4 million voter records through it this year (see [[Sam Hayes]]). How removals based on those checks work is mapped in [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]]. ## Where it has broken There have been four well-documented failures since 2018. They share a pattern: **in every case, the error happened inside the agency's systems, after the applicant had given an accurate answer or shown the right documents.** | State | When | What went wrong | Scale | Votes cast | |---|---|---|---|---| | California | Apr–Sept 2018 | DMV clerks made data-entry errors in the first months of the "New Motor Voter" program. One green-card holder's citizenship field was changed and changed back, but the record was still sent to election officials. | About 1,500 wrong registrations, some of them noncitizens. This came after about 23,000 other registration errors disclosed a month earlier. | None reported. Registrations were cancelled before the election. | | Illinois | Mid-2018 to 2019 | A flaw in the AVR system at the Secretary of State's driver facilities registered people who had identified themselves as noncitizens. | About 574 noncitizens | Of 15 initially flagged, 7 turned out to be citizens who checked the wrong box. The state said one person voted illegally. | | Oregon | 2021–2024 | A poorly designed dropdown menu led DMV staff to record that noncitizens had shown U.S. passports or birth certificates when they hadn't. The problem started after a 2021 law allowed licenses without proof of legal presence. | 1,259 found in September 2024, rising to about 1,800 | 10 voted (at least one had become a citizen by then). Later review found only 38 with any voting history, many of them citizens, and no vote that could have changed an outcome. | | New Jersey | June 2023 – June 2024 | A software error at the Motor Vehicle Commission's vendor, IDEMIA, registered people who had answered "no" to the citizenship question. | About 6,600 | Fewer than 400. See [[New Jersey MVC Noncitizen Registration Error]]. | Oregon commissioned an outside audit by the accounting firm Baker Tilly, released in July 2025. It found that the system's controls were generally sound, with gaps. In a sample, about 1 in 35 voters coded as citizens had no proof of citizenship on file. The auditors called the problem "likely too small to affect the outcome of an election" but a "moderate reputational and compliance risk." Since the fixes took effect in fall 2024, the DMV has found no new errors in its monthly sampling. *The Federalist* applied the sample rate to the whole Motor Voter roll and got roughly 21,000 voters. That number is the outlet's own extrapolation, not a finding of the audit. ## Two readings of the same record **The case against AVR.** The [[America First Policy Institute]] and allied groups argue that AVR, combined with licenses for undocumented immigrants, makes voter rolls vulnerable by design. Every documented failure, they say, proves the risk is real rather than hypothetical. Their prescription is documentary proof of citizenship at registration, mandatory audits, and governors ordering state agencies to verify citizenship (see [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]]). AFPI's March 2026 fact sheet says "thousands" of noncitizens have been removed from rolls nationally, but it gives no total or source for that figure. **The case for AVR.** Defenders point out that the errors came from agency systems, not from applicants lying, and that each was caught by the state's own checks and fixed. The numbers that actually voted are tiny next to the millions of eligible citizens AVR registers. They also note that documentary-proof rules have a measured cost: when [[Kris Kobach]] required them in Kansas, more than 30,000 eligible citizens were blocked from registering, compared with 67 noncitizens found in 20 years. Both sides agree on one point: the weak link is the data handoff between the DMV and election officials. ## The 2026 campaign to end it The failures turned into a legislative push in 2026: - **Georgia.** State Rep. [[Tim Fleming]], the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, sponsored **HB 1467**, which would switch Georgia's AVR from opt-out to opt-in. Whoever wins that race will run the 2028 presidential election in a top battleground. - **New Jersey.** After Governor [[Mikie Sherrill]] disclosed the IDEMIA error, Republican legislators introduced **A5489 / S4762** on September 14, 2026. The bills would eliminate AVR, restore opt-in registration, and require proof of citizenship to register at the MVC. As of the most recent bill record, they were in committee. - **Federal.** The [[SAVE Act]] (pushed in 2026 as the "SAVE America Act") would require documentary proof of citizenship *with each registration application*, including at DMVs. The [[Brennan Center for Justice]] argues this would "severely hamper automatic voter registration," because most DMV transactions, including online address changes, happen when nobody has a passport or birth certificate in hand. The House adopted a budget framework that included the bill in July 2026, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that its provisions didn't fit the reconciliation process, and the Senate hasn't acted. The White House said in late August that passage was most likely after the midterms. ## Who pays when the system fails In each failure, the government made the mistake. The person who carries the legal risk is the noncitizen. Federal immigration law makes anyone who votes unlawfully deportable, whether or not they knew they were ineligible. The only narrow exception covers people who reasonably believed they were citizens and meet other conditions. A resident who told the DMV the truth, was registered anyway, and assumed a government registration meant they could vote, is exposed. This isn't hypothetical. In 2020, Illinois immigration attorney Mony Ruiz Velasco warned that people registered by the glitch could face deportation once voting came up in their citizenship interviews. In July 2026, the day after New Jersey disclosed its error, an [[ICE]] lawyer concluded in an internal email that the people registered "through no fault of their own" were deportable. ICE's deputy director replied that [[Homeland Security Investigations]] was "heavily working these cases" (see [[ICE Voter Records Collection]]). ## Why it matters AVR is where the fight over noncitizen voting became an administrative fight. The national argument about whether noncitizens vote in meaningful numbers has largely been settled by the evidence: they don't. So the pressure has moved to the system itself. If every DMV data error counts as proof that AVR is unsafe, the policy answer becomes opt-in registration or document checks for everyone, and both reduce registration among eligible citizens far more than among noncitizens. There is a real problem underneath the politics. The citizenship check in AVR is only as good as one clerk's dropdown menu and one vendor's code. Oregon's audit and Georgia's pending list show the gate can be fixed without closing the door. The 2026 bills in Georgia, New Jersey and Congress propose to close it. ## See Also - [[Proof of Citizenship Requirement]] — the documentary-proof push that AVR's critics want to replace it with - [[SAVE Act]] — the federal bill that would require documents at every registration, including at the DMV - [[National Voter Registration Act]] — the 1993 "motor voter" law that AVR builds on - [[New Jersey MVC Noncitizen Registration Error]] — the 2026 case that restarted the debate - [[ICE Voter Records Collection]] — what ICE did with voter registration data - [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]] — how DMV data and SAVE checks feed removals - [[Tim Fleming]] — Georgia's opt-in bill and the 2026 Secretary of State race