This Monday is the last day Virginia residents can register to vote in the 2009 general election, so if you live in Virginia, make sure to have your application in the mail by then. Also, we have a brief update from some of the House of Delegates races making news this week:

• HD-10: Democratic House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong -– who also serves as the DLCC’s Finance Chair -– juggles a lot of responsibilities, but his constituents back home always come first. Armstrong has been fighting a proposed utility rate hike for over a year – he’s lobbied the state utilities commission, held interactive town halls, and even organized a letter-writing campaign against the increase, noting that “People are hurting and the last thing they need is another rate increase.”
  
  

• HD-25: After Republican Delegate Steve Landes’ shaky debate performance last week, it appears he’s had enough. Landes is ducking a forum co-hosted by the Staunton News-Leader, complaining that the paper is too biased. That’s a pretty flimsy excuse, since the News-Leader endorsed both George W. Bush and former Republican Sen. George Allen in recent elections. More likely, Landes is just afraid he'll have to defend his record again.
  
  

• HD-86: Democratic challenger Stevens Miller has a new ad taking Republican Del. Tom Rust to task for breaking a promise to require insurers to cover autism treatments. Rust campaigned on the issue, but then he voted against it. Blue Commonwealth has the ad, and they also dug up some incredible video of Rust refusing to even move the bill out of committee.
  
  

• Student Voting: The Virginia Board of Elections has recently approved a new rule allowing college students to register to vote using their dormitory addresses. Some localities already allowed this, but now the standard will apply statewide. We encourage all students who want to vote from their school addresses to register, but be sure to do it by Monday!

The U.S. Justice Department has struck down a controversial Georgia election law as a violation of Voting Rights Act:

In a letter released on Monday, the Justice Department said the state's voter-verification program is frequently inaccurate and has a "discriminatory effect" on minority voters in Georgia.

"This flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote," said Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's civil-rights division. Ms. King's letter was sent to Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker on Friday.

(…)Justice Department officials said the citizenship match has flagged 7,007 individuals as noncitizens but that many of those matches have been shown to be in error.

"Thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged," the Justice Department letter said.

Last month, we spotlighted a recently-passed Georgia law (SB 86) requiring voters to provide citizenship documentation when registering. That law also requires database matching, and we noted at the time that such systems routinely disqualify a high percentage of lawful voters – sometimes as high as 30%. Now we have proof that Georgia’s system would be no different, and the Justice Department acted accordingly.

Hopefully, the Justice Department will soon strike down SB 86 as well.

Indiana has made voter registration simpler and easier with a new law allowing voters to register online:

The election bill will let people with valid driver's licenses or state identification cards file voter registration forms over the Internet. Currently, people can download registration applications online, but they must print out and mail in the forms.

The law, which passed unanimously in both houses of the legislature, makes Indiana the 4th state to approve online registration. This comes on the heels of Colorado passing a similar law just a few months ago.

Voting rights advocates argue that online registration encourages participation by simplifying the process, especially for younger voters. Online security technology can also make it a more secure registration option than traditional paper forms.

Georgia Republicans in the legislature and Gov. Sonny Perdue have enacted a controversial new law that imposes onerous new documentation burdens for new voters and requires registration information to match records in the state driving database. This new law threatens to disenfranchise thousands of lawful voters and hamstring the efforts of nonpartisan registration groups.

The law's most widely-reported change forces new voters to submit documentation proving US citizenship (such as a passport or birth certificate) with their registration forms -– a requirement that has voting-rights advocates outraged:

The law revived a racially charged battle in Georgia. Critics complain it would disenfranchise poor and minority voters — many of them U.S. citizens — who lack required documents.

Starting Jan. 1, 2010 if Justice approves, the Georgia law would require all applying for voter registration to provide documented proof of U.S. citizenship. Those who stay on active voter rolls and have already registered before then would not have to submit such documents as a U.S. passport, naturalization documents or driver's license or birth certificate.

"It's tantamount to a poll tax," said Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She said the group was considering a legal challenge if the law clears the Justice Department.

Another, arguably more worrying, section of the law orders the Secretary of State to verify all new registrations using the state’s Driver Services database.

Ohio faced this same issue in 2008, when Ohio Republicans sued to force the Democratic Secretary of State to perform similar database matching. In that case, which eventually went to the Supreme Court, independent analysts like NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice noted that such requirements routinely invalidate thousands of lawful voters –- sometimes at rates as high as 30 percent.

If upheld by Justice Department officials, who must evaluate the changes under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the new law will likely make it much more difficult to register to vote, and it could leave thousands of lawful voters disenfranchised by clerical typos completely beyond their control.

Colorado will soon become the third state in the country where voters will have the freedom to register to vote online.

One month ago, the House of Representatives passed HB1160:

[The bill] would allow people to register to vote, request a mail-in ballot or change their voting address online through what bill proponents say will be a highly secure website run by the Colorado secretary of state's office. The bill would not allow people to cast votes online.

The measure enjoyed sweeping support, with a final vote of 60-4.

Today, the Senate passed its version of the bill with unanimous support.

Voters in Arizona and Washington currently utilize this kind of online process, and advocates say that the system has led to higher registration numbers. Others point out that this system is in many ways more secure than the paper registrations processed in other states.

Today, the New York Times gets in on the act:

For more than three years starting in 2005, there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register with the Republican Party and a rise among voters who affiliate with Democrats and, almost as often, with no party at all.

As the story notes, swings in voter registration happen all the time. Often it's reflective of nothing more than which party has the better field organization or the more heated primary. It's also true that party affiliation often does not have an impact on Election Day turnout. Plenty of registered Democrats pulled the lever for Bush in 2004, for instance.

But a sustained movement away from the GOP over a period of years is significant:

[F]or a shift away from one party to sustain itself — the current registration trend is now in its fourth year — is remarkable, researchers who study voting patterns say. And though comparable data are not available for the 21 states where voters do not register by party, there is evidence that an increasing number of voters in those states are also moving away from the Republican Party based on the results of recent state and Congressional elections, the researchers said.

So now we're onto something.

But if a damaged GOP brand and a new generation of progressive-leaning voters are causing an actual, quantifiable change in the nation's voting population, what are the implications? Well, the NYT suggests that this change in voter registration isn't all about choosing a new president:

Elected Democrats have made significant inroads even in places where Republicans have enjoyed a generation of dominance. In Colorado, for example, Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the Legislature for the first time in over four decades. Last year, Virginia Democrats gained a 21-to-19 majority over Republicans in the State Senate, the first time the party has controlled that body in a decade.

In New Hampshire, Democrats are in control of both the legislative and executive branches for the first time since 1874. In Iowa, Democrats have taken over the statehouse and the governor’s office simultaneously for the first time in a generation.

The changes in state government could have broad implications for Congressional redistricting and on policies like immigration, health care reform and environmental regulation, which are increasingly decided at the state level.

But even as we are measuring the impact, we have to ask if these shifts can be sustained. Are they a reaction to the general incompetence of the GOP -- from the Bush administration to Republican-controlled state governments -- all across the country? If so, does that mean these trends will slow down and reverse as new leaders take office? Or is this about a generation of Millennials coming of age and engaging in the political process?

This election will answer some of these questions, I suspect. But not all of them.

As you can probably tell, I'm fascinated by the upswing in Democratic voter registration in states across the country (Acknowledging all the usual caveats, of course). For me, the larger question is not how this effects the 2008 Election, but what a shift that numbers of the millions might mean in regards to the nation's the long term political trends.

Unsurprisingly, I was intrigued by this piece from Rhodes Cook, which attempts to take a wide-angle view of these changes (bonus points for lots of charts):

In the 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) where voter affiliation is kept by party, the Democrats have scored perceptible gains since the presidential election of 2004 while the Republicans have suffered significant losses. To be specific, the number of registered Democrats in party registration states has grown by nearly 700,000 since President George W. Bush was reelected in November 2004, while the total of registered Republicans has declined by almost 1 million.

Rhodes acknowledges that this shift is occurring in a pool of 96 million registered, partisan voters, so lets temper some enthusiasm here. But as I've written about before, some of those shifts are occurring in some significant places -- in PA, with a shift of million voters to the Democratic column, for example.

There are also some important states for Democrats (particularly legislators) -- OH, MI, VA, MN and WI -- which don't require voters to identify with a party. And I don't think it's too much to assume that similar movement toward the Democratic party is occurring in these states as well.

Sunday brought news of yet another state (Florida) where Democrats are banking new voters at a serious clip:

Democratic voters have out-registered Republicans by a nearly 7-to-1 margin since January.

State totals show Democrats gained a net of 106,508 voters from January through May, compared with 16,686 for the GOP.

As I've said before, new voters flocking to our party is definitely a good thing. Even more so when it's a state like Florida, which is hard to top in terms of political significance in recent history.

But I want to temper expectations a bit. For one, as the Orlando Sentinel reports:

In a state with 10.45 million voters, the new figures didn't significantly change the overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans; the state is still roughly 41 percent Democrat and 37 percent registered Republican, with most of the rest No Party Affiliation.

For another, new voters won't necessarily have a huge impact -- at least when it comes to our legislative races. There might not be a state in the country with a worse map in terms of districts. Democrats picked up 7 seats in the lower chamber last cycle, and we're still down 43/76. Even another unqualified victory like this in November will leave us seriously behind.

That doesn't mean this news isn't welcome or encouraging. It just means we still have a long way to go before a real Democratic agenda gets any traction in the state.

As long as these stories keep getting written, I'm going to keep noting them here:

Democrats now have a 55,560-voter lead over the Republicans in a state that was dead even a presidential cycle ago.

(via)

Chris Kromm at Facing South posts some more exciting news about Democratic voter registration in Georgia and North Carolina:

Georgia has grown the most: an astounding 300,000 new voters have been added to the rolls since January 2008, putting the total number of active registrants at 4.7 million […]

According to N.C. State Board of Election statistics, just over 203,000 new voters have registered since January.

Like Georgia, new registrations have favored Democratic, independent and African-American voters. African-American voters have gone from 20.1% to 20.7% of the N.C. electorate in 2008. By party, Democrats have gone from 44.8% to 45.3%, and unaffiliated voters from 20.9% to 21.4% since January.

Those gains have been at the expense of Republicans, who went from being 34.3% of N.C. voters in January to 33.3% by the end of June -- a one-point drop.

This comes on the heels of a Democratic voter registration drive in Louisiana, which completely overwhelmed the state board of elections.

This is obviously only half the battle (still gotta get registered voters to the polls on Election Day) but these reports are still unreservedly good news.