Illinois should adopt automatic voter registration

As Mike Riopell and Mary Hansen mention in the article "President Obama greets old friends during Springfield visit," the POTUS advised the Illinois General Assembly on how to build a better politics during his speech last week.

A key step is to make voting easier by modernizing our registration system, which is currently outdated, inefficient and prone to error.

For instance, over 1 million eligible voters were turned away at the polls due to errors in their registration forms in the last presidential election.

Obama urged state legislators to "make the Land of Lincoln a leader in voter participation." Illinois now has the opportunity to set the bar for other states across the country, thanks to Sen. Manar and Rep. Gabel, who have sponsored bills to automatically register eligible voters through interactions with government offices.

Making it easier to vote would result in more voices being heard in elections across party lines. And by switching to a system of automatic voter registration, we can eliminate a timely and wasteful bureaucratic process.

This would save a significant amount of taxpayer dollars.

Let's take the president's suggestion and support automatic voter registration as Illinoisans, young and old, men and women, Democrat and Republican. As noted by the president himself, "we're in one of those moments."

Now is the time to bring our voter registration system into the modern age.

Heather Dube, Illinois Public Interest Research Group

Chicago